Agriculture module

Resource persons: Mr. Srikanth, Mr. Pattanashetti, Mr. S.L. Desai and Miss Sangeetha
Date: 12/03/09
The AME foundation has been working to promote ecological agriculture for the past 27years. Mr. Srikanth has been working in the AME foundation for the past two years. He briefed us about the agriculture scenario of India. His briefing included the history of agriculture, ranking of different food grains of India. He explained about the agricultural scenario of Karnataka. Technological developments like mechanization, major and minor irrigations, use of chemicals (like pesticides, fertilizers), hybrid seeds and greenhouse cultivation are leading farming towards enterprise.
The video shown gave us an idea of the impact of the practice of conventional agriculture on the environment, natural resources, health, economy and various components of life. The use of conventional agriculture is a lose-lose situation. Due to the Green Revolution, production of food increased, but in the long run we lost many things, like internal support systems that were associated with traditional agriculture. A research study says that vegetables grown in India contain 20 times more pesticide residue than the standard limits. Even mothers’ milk contains these hazardous chemicals. Many farmers commit suicide because of the heavy debt taken by the money lenders that the farmers were not able to repay. This is pushing a number of families into a very bad position. Kasargud town in Kerala reveals another tragic story of these slow poisons; many children are born with disabilities and some become disabled in the later stages of life. This extreme pain made people in this village think and move toward organic farming.
Mr. Pattanashetti gave a presentation on how to reach the unreached families. We learnt that out of the total agricultural land not more than 30 percentage can be irrigated. A proportion of the agricultural land will remain rain-fed. This brings us to an important juncture of addressing the issue of non-irrigated land.
There are five categories of the farmers.
1. Innovators-5percentage(elite farmers)
2. Early adopters-15percentage(non elite formers)
3. Early majority-50 percentage(non elite formers)
4. Late majority-25 percentage(non elite formers)
5. Non adopters-5 percentage(non elite formers)
Support is necessary for these non elite farmers to recognize available subsidies, government policies, importance of indigenous technologies and the complexity of handling externalities such as forward linkages and backward linkages. Indian government need to develop some simple approaches for the above-mentioned challenges.
Mr. S.L. Desai presented about the evolution of agriculture. Mainly we learnt about
• Agriculture before the Green Revolution
• Conventional agriculture
• Surplus farming
• Market formation
• Commercial farming
• Fall-outs
Climate change is another important subject covered by Mr. Srikanth. The origin of this is mainly due to human activities. This will have more effect on the Asian population as this continent has more population. No single solution can solve this problem, so a series of integrated work is to be done
• Use of clean, effective resources
• Crop diversification
• Use of renewable energy
“We have not inherited the earth from our fore fathers
We have barrowed it from our children!”(AME Power point presentation on 12/04/09)


Date: 13/03/09
The session started with a video that contains information about the farmers in Bellary and Chitradurga. These farmers grow groundnut as their main crop. Earlier they used to grow using conventional technology, which leads to heavy debts by money lenders and low yield. After the intervention of AME they slowly changed the way of farming, and now it is a farmer-friendly process. Farmers are getting not only a good yield, but they now understand the need of organic farming. Miss Sangeetha explained about Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture (LEISA), which is a step toward organic farming using modern and indigenous technology, which generates a basket of options to the farmer by a participatory approach. LEISA targets both small and marginal farmers, especially in the dry-land agriculture. It is an intermediate approach that is a blend of both intensive and organic farming with natural resource management and utilization. It aims to improve and stabilize productivity by decreasing the production cost and its impact on the environment, soil, water and biodiversity. The major problems faced here are:
• Moisture stress during the crop growth stage
• Shallow soil depth and poor fertility
• Monocropping
LEISA focuses on farming five major aspects of farming:
1. Water conservation
2. Improvement of soil fertility
3. Biomass
4. Cropping system
5. IGAs
LEISA empowers the farmer by providing the technology, building the capacity, using the participatory approach of Farmers Field School (FFS), sharing experiences and conducting outreach activities.
This session was followed by the video session, which concentrated on the seed conservation activities by the Green Foundation.
By 3:00 in the afternoon we left for the field visit to Inam Veerapura and Kurdikeri. In Inam Veerapura we saw models of some of the important aspects in farming:
• Effect of growing plants across the slopes
• Moisture-holding capacity of good soil
• Integrated farming
• Nadep* composting
• Enrichment of farm yard manure(FYM)
• Preparation of urea locally
• Strategies to differentiate good vermicompost
• Testing viability of seeds
• Seed treatment
• Preparation of herbal insecticides
• Azolla growing
After this we went to the field in Kurdikeri. Here we learnt more about Agro Ecosystem Analysis (AESA). The practical knowledge that we gained by doing it with the farmer was really interesting and enriching. The group dynamic games we played made us friendlier with everybody in the group.
Date: 13/03/09
The day started with the rules for the debate we were going to do with Mr. Srikanth. We assembled in the mini seminar hall. When debate started, participants were subdued but, later everybody participated actively. For the final sharing we again assembled in the training hall. Here all the resource persons gave their comments on our debate. The resource persons stated that both the teams had a good source of information and good preparedness. It was announced that Industrial economy team got higher marks than the rural economy group.
Mr. Srinkanth enriched us by sharing his knowledge about integrated farming systems and livestock. The session ended with feedback on the module by all the fellows.
My learnings from this module
• Difficulties in dry land agriculture
• Alternatives for the conventional agriculture system
• Threatening hazards of pesticides
• Vision of AME Foundation
• Importance of Farmers Field School