With the State government launching an initiative to promote collective farming, the Agriculture Department officials on Saturday urged farmers to pool their land and resources to derive the benefits of large-scale farming.
With nearly 92% of farmers in Tamil Nadu being small and marginal farmers with limited capacity to mobilise credit, adopt latest technologies and add value to their produce, the initiative aims at the increasing their income through collective farming and pooling of resources. Under the initiative, collective farming would be encouraged by creating farmers interest groups (FIG), farmers producers groups (FPG) and farmers producer organisations (FPO). Each FIG will have 20 members, located in broadly contiguous areas, and would cultivate a single crop in a season. This will enable small and marginal farmers of FIGs to consolidate their holdings, without changing the ownership of land, and resources to get the benefit of large scale farming, officials explained.
The Agriculture Department hosted a day-long seminar for its officials to brief them on the concept. Speaking on the occasion, Minister for Agriculture R. Doraikannu observed that the State can make big strides in increasing productivity through the collective farming initiative.
Explaining the rationale behind the concept, K. Shanmugam, Additional Chief Secretary (Finance), observed that collective farming could help farmers overcome the two main risks posed by natural vagaries and price fluctuations.
Gagandeep Singh Bedi, Principal Secretary, Agriculture, said the State government has sanctioned ₹100 crore for providing a corpus fund of ₹5 lakh each for FPGs and the initiative would cover about 40 lakh farmers in a phased manner. Each FPG would have a minimum of 100 farmers so that they can adopt a collective method of farming.
Vellamandi N. Natarajan and S. Valarmathi, State Ministers, P. Kumar, MP, V.Chandrasekaran, Director, Agriculture, Archana Patnaik, Director, Horticulture, K.Rajamani, Collector, spoke.
