The rattled bones one gets from a wobbly tractor ride for 2 kilometres on a narrow mud road on a hot and sweaty day are worth the pain when the destination presents a visual treat of lush green fields in organised layouts.
The palpable shift from the cacophony of city life in Vijayawada to the serenity of cultivating crops in harmony with nature in agricultural fields on the outskirts of Tippanagunta village under Bapulapadu mandal of Krishna district in Andhra Pradesh seems a welcome change.
“This patch of land is brought under the Pre-Monsoon Dry Sowing (PMDS) model with 32 varieties of crops,” says Atkuri Dhana Lakshmi, pointing to the farmland she has acquired on lease. Clad in a pastel pink cotton sari and her head covered with the loose end (pallu) of it, the 44-year-old tenant farmer from Tippanagunta village, along with others of her like, is growing pulses, vegetables and cereals on 2.5 acres of land.
Showing a bundle of freshly-harvested jeeluga, also known as dhaincha(Sesbania aculeata) , a leguminous green manure crop that fixes nitrogen in the soil, placed on the bund in a row of other crops like red gram and cereals, she says it is only recently that she stopped using chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides and made the switch to natural farming.
“It took some time for me to get convinced about natural farming but no regrets whatsoever,” she says citing its multiple benefits like improved yield, increased income with a minimum cost of production, elimination of chemical inputs and reduced water consumption.
Natural farming got an impetus in the State with the intervention of Rythu Sadhikara Samstha (RySS), a farmers’ empowerment cooperation, the implementing agency of the Andhra Pradesh Community-Managed Natural Farming (APCMNF).
“We encourage farmers to undertake the PMDS model as it provides green cover to the land for all the 365 days of the year. It also improves the soil fertility besides serving the bigger cause of environment conservation,” says R. Aruna, the Regional Project Coordinator of RySS.
APCMNF supports smallholder farmers to switch from chemically intensive agriculture to natural farming through practices such as using organic residues and minimising tillage to improve soil health, re-introducing indigenous seeds and diversifying crops including trees.
Launched in 2016 by the Government of Andhra Pradesh, the agency aims to find a sustainable solution to farmers’ distress caused by the economic crisis in agriculture and climate change.
The APCMNF is aggressively promoting the PMDS model, as it enables the farmer to take home three crops in a year, even in rainfed conditions in semi-arid areas. This is a paradigm shift since, in normal conditions, farmers in rainfed situations grow only one crop and leave the land fallow for the rest of the year. This mode of agriculture is based on scientific principles and comes into play in the non-farming season or whenever there is no crop cover on the land.
“Additionally, we get financial benefits by selling vegetables and grass from the PMDS fields, which give us income throughout the year,” says Padma Ragam, another farmer from the village.
In the abutting farm, a group of workers from West Bengal are seen transplanting paddy seedlings into puddled and levelled ground. “Due to severe shortage of farm labour in the State, owners of farmlands rope in migrant workers from West Bengal and Odisha,” informs Aruna.
At Arugolanu, a neighbouring village, Sobhilam Chalam Prasad has widened his farm bunds and taken up boundary plantation, a low-cost technique that has the dual benefits of soil and water conservation and a means for sustainable agricultural intensification.
“It helps to increase crop yield without expanding farmlands. The border crops of horticulture and vegetables will not only prevent pest attacks on the paddy sown in the field but it will also bring additional income,” explains Chalam Prasad.
Nurturing change agents
A few yards from his farmland is the Arugolanu High School campus where students are groomed as change agents by engaging them in developing Nutri Gardens of ATM (Any Time Money) and ‘Suryamandalam’ models.
A Nutri Garden is a low-cost, scientific model of a kitchen/homestead garden with a variety of nutritious vegetables, fruits and medicinal plants produced throughout the year organically to ensure the nutritional security of the growers in rural areas. The Suryamandalam model is one where vegetables and leafy greens are grown on 5 to 10 cents of land using only organic fertilisers.
“The objective is to eradicate malnutrition and achieve the goal of nutritional self-sufficiency among kids. Each bed of crop has been allocated to students of different classes and this has triggered a very healthy competition among them,” K. Naga Malleswari, Additional Krishna District Project Manager, RySS, says with a smile.
Farmers are constantly educated on the preparation of natural fertilisers and growth promoters such as Beejamrutham, Dhrava Jeevamrutham, Ghana Jeevamrutham, Saptha Dhanyankura Dravanam, Dasaparni Kashayam, Agnastram, Neemastharam and Brahmastram, besides the use of concoctions prepared using fermented buttermilk, seed palletisation (covering the seed with layers of bio-stimulant, fine clay, ash and water to help the seed stay viable for longer duration when sown in dry atmospheric situations), egg amino acid and chilli garlic solution.
They follow the basic principles of natural farming by keeping the soil covered with crops around the year, sowing diverse crops including trees, keeping the soil covered with crop residues in the absence of living plants causing minimal disturbance to soil and minimising tillage.
After attending a series of sessions by a wide network of ‘internal community resource persons’ at the village level, ‘master community resource persons’ at the mandal and district levels and ‘regional project coordinators’ of the thematic leads at the State level, the farmers practising natural farming techniques now prefer to use only indigenous seeds, try and integrate animals into farming and use biostimulants as catalysts to trigger soil biology.
Thatti Satyavathi recognised the usefulness and growing demand for these natural fertilizers and growth promoters among farmers in the village. She therefore opened a mini Non-Pesticide Management (NPM) shop where stocks of the growth promoters stored in large-size drums get empty within no time.
“Initially, I started preparing them for my personal use alone. But after seeing the good result they yielded, I decided to scale up the production and sell them to farmers,” she says. Satyavathi now earns an additional income of anything between ₹3,000 and ₹5,000 every month.
At Kanugolu village, senior citizens Chalamalasetti Anuradha, Chalamalasetti Padmavathi and Vaddi Seetha Mahalakshmi, all three from the same family, have groomed a 365-day kitchen garden using natural farm techniques on a small piece of land acquired on lease. “Ever since we started this kitchen garden, families in the vicinity have stopped buying vegetables from shops and local vendors. There is high demand for our farm products,” says Anuradha with a chuckle.
The trio, which started growing vegetables in a small way for their own consumption, is almost indispensable now for families living around.
World’s largest
APCNF is recognised as the world’s largest agroecology programme, currently reaching over a million smallholder farmers, predominantly women, across 5,00,000 hectares in Andhra Pradesh.
The programme also generated environmental and social benefits, including greater soil carbon sequestration, reversal of land degradation, reduced soil temperatures and increased biodiversity.
“The success of this programme relies on four main factors—delivery through an established network of women collectives, farmer-to-farmer learning mode via ‘Champion Farmers’, progressive technology and government ownership,” says T. Vijay Kumar, Executive Vice-Chairman of RySS.
Prior to APCNF, Vijay Kumar served as the CEO of Andhra Pradesh’s flagship poverty alleviation programme, Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP), which mobilised 11.5 million rural women into credit-based self-help groups (SHGs). Today these collectives serve as the key pillar for APCMNF, making it a community-powered women-led movement.
The APCMNF did face initial challenges. Vijay Kumar says it took time to convince the department that what they proposed to do was not conventional farm practice but it was ultra-modern science.
Insisting that natural farming is regenerative agriculture that blends sustainable innovation with tradition by focusing literally on the regeneration of the soil and of the planet’s ecosystems, Vijay Kumar explains that hitherto, efforts were made to supply nutrients to the soil externally as it was believed that plants deplete them from the soil.
“But the reality is that plants feed the soil and in return, they take these nutrients, available in abundance in the soil,” he says, insisting that there’s no need to add even 1 gram of urea for the next thousand years.
“Science tells us this. But, it is hard for people to accept this change, as they want to stick to the assumption that we provide food to plants,” he says with a wry smile. During the time of M.S. Swaminathan, popularly known as the Father of India’s Green Revolution, this concept did not exist and it started only 20-30 years ago, he says.
“When you gain new scientific knowledge, you should put it into practice. Science keeps changing and we should keep pace with it. Plants are soil engineers, as they increase the soil’s porosity. We at APCMNF have gone deep into this science like nobody else has,” he asserts.
Global recognition
The scientific research and the profound impact it created for the large community of natural farmers in the State has brought global recognition to APCMNF, which was the joint recipient of the 2024 Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity, a €1 million prize award given by Portugal-based Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in recognition of outstanding contributions to climate action and solutions that inspire hope and possibility.
A team of representatives from APCNF and officials of the Agriculture Department received the award presented in Lisbon at a function held on July 12, 2024.
Soil scientist Rattan Lal, USA/India and a conglomeration of NGOs called Sekem (Egypt) share this year’s Gulbenkian award with India’s APCNF.
Champion farmer
Nettem Nagendramma from Ghantapuram village in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh, recognised as the ‘Champion Farmer Coach’ by the APCMNF for the pivotal she played in mobilising SHG members into natural farming, was part of the delegation to Lisbon, where she shared her success story in natural farming.
“A team from RySS visited our village in 2016 to explain how women members of Self-Help-Groups (SHGs) were now diversifying into natural farming and supplementing the income of their spouses. I did not pay heed to it,” she recounts.
Subsequently, in 2018, representatives of APCMNF caught her attention and she decided to give it a try in an 800 square meters of land.
“It did not take long for me to realise the difference natural farming can make. Besides improved crop yield, the food produced has higher nutrition density and offers better health benefits. I observed a marked improvement in the health of my nine-year-old anaemic daughter,” she says with a glint in her eyes.
She scaled up the cultivation area and received increased yield, compared to chemical farming and at a lower cost and shared the surplus produce with other SHG members and neighbours who were convinced of the benefits of natural farming.
In 2019, Nagendramma was appointed as a trainer to mobilise more farmers to adopt natural farming and in 2023, she was elevated to the Model Master Trainer position and tasked with mentoring other trainers across the district. Today, Nagendramma, along with her husband, practices natural farming on two hectares and earns more than 50% of the village’s average farmer income.
Currently, the APCNF is implementing natural farming in 4,116 gram panchayats and 7,746 village organisations through 2.31 lakh SHGs across 662 mandals of Andhra Pradesh. The government aims to reach out to all the 8 million farmer households in Andhra Pradesh in the next 10 years and inspire the programme’s replication in other States too.
The model is already being incubated across 12 States in India. The programme receives funding from Central schemes like Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana, Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana and Bharatiya Prakriti Krishi Padhati. The recently announced National Mission of Natural Farming is also expected to provide funds from this year.
Other donors include KfW Bank Germany, which extended a 90 million euro loan to the government of Andhra Pradesh for supporting APCNF’s work during 2020-2027, Azim Premji Foundation which has been extending financial assistance for programme management and technical support during 2017-27 and Co-impact, an international donor assisting in systems change for deepening natural farming in Andhra Pradesh and seeding it outside the State during 2022-2027.
“Delegations from 45 countries have visited the State to see our work. Many nations are eager to embrace natural farming and we are equipping our farmers to spread the seeds of our success far and wide,” says Vijay Kumar.
The first batch of farmers from Andhra Pradesh will leave for Zambia this August-end to share their knowledge and upskill their counterparts in that country, while another group is headed to Indonesia later this year.
Published - August 16, 2024 08:43 am IST
