Two years ago, Naganna, then 34 years old, abandoned his 30 guntas (0.75 acre) of drought-ravaged agriculture land at Uppulgerikopplu village in Mandya district in Karnataka and moved with his wife and two children to the big, bright city of Bengaluru. He took up work as a decoration assistant for weddings and earned Rs 6,000 a month.
“I had to pay for food and other expenses even during work hours.” He stuck it out for two months and the wedding season came to an end, along with his work. Disheartened, “I realised I could not maintain my family in that big city,” he said. “We came back to our village.” At that time, a young agriculture graduate, Anand L, from the neighbouring Hassan district, was brimming with ideas, talking to every farmer he could lay his eyes on.
Naganna listened with disbelief as Anand, an employee of a fresh produce supply chain company called Lawrencedale Agro Processing (LEAF), dished out advice on how to improve crop yields from his small holding by using better seeds, less fertiliser, science, technology and inter-cropping. He also spoke of better packaging of vegetables that Naganna used to grow on his land, better marketing and better returns. “I decided to take a chance,” Naganna told ET Magazine.
He bought a share in the newly set up Malavalli Horticulture Farmer Producers Company Limited by paying Rs 1,000, diligently shelled out higher amounts for seeds that were identified by Anand and his fellow workers, drastically reduced and changed the fertilisers that he normally used, and watered and harvested his crop exactly in line with the pattern given.
“I sowed a crop of okra over 20 guntas. They asked me to separate the rows more than I normally do. They did a soil test before I planted the seeds they supplied and told me the exact amount of fertiliser that I should put in, much less than usual. I put the fertiliser as soon as I sowed the crop and then watered it, a new technique that Anand taught me,” says Naganna.
“The shoots started to come out in four days and 95% of the seeds sprouted. Happy, I called Anand and asked whether I could put in the urea. He said, don’t put anything at all for 21 days, just water it correctly. I was shocked. But I had decided to do what he said, even if I lost the entire crop.”
Naganna’s bounty was way beyond his imagination. Against the normal yield of sixseven harvests of about 600 kg of okra, he got 24 harvests, a jaw-dropping 1,830 kg and a profit of Rs 48,000 from a two-month crop in a drought year with lower input costs. The cabbage that he planted in the remaining 10 guntas of his land yielded a profit of Rs 22,000.
“I don’t feel the drought at all! I have brought six-seven members of my family into this project. I want to go from village to village, explaining what I have experienced,” he says. Naganna is just one of the 130 farmers adopted from a pool of 964 members in the Malavalli Farmer Producer Organisation (FPO), which is working with LEAF and Karnataka’s Horticulture Department in a project called Public Private Partnership-Integrated Horticulture Development (PPPIHD), a Central government scheme announced by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in its second term (see “Joining Hands”).
The Congress government in Karnataka gave a push to the PPPIHD scheme late in 2015, after two years of drought, in the hope that it will help keep the farming community afloat.
Kshama Patil, Karnataka’s deputy director of horticulture, FPO & PPP-IHD Project Monitoring Unit, has registered 76 of the proposed 92 FPOs in Karnataka, while the rest are “in the process”. All 76 are functioning to improve the lot of farmers, while seven have taken the giant step to link up with big companies with agriculture knowledge and marketing facilities and push their crop. Three are inking such contracts, 15 are in the pipeline.
“The PPP-IHD is quite successful as a project, though some FPOs are facing initial problems,” Patil says, cautiously. “We can only see results in the long term. But it has helped farmers, particularly those struggling with drought.”
