How Policies On Natural Farming Favour Women With Land, Networks
Improved soil health is one of the key reasons for promoting natural farming. But women who do most of the work on farms, have limited control over land and are unable to invest successfully in it
Until around three years ago, Sitaben, 45, paid Rs 20-30,000 every year for a piece of land to cultivate in her village in the Jambusar block of Gujarat’s Bharuch district. But being a tenant farmer meant precarity: “It could be this plot this year and next year, in the neighbouring village,” she said. “I could never plan what to grow the next year or sometimes the next crop.”
Around three years ago, in lieu of a loan for Rs 10 lakh she secured from a landholder the long-term right to cultivate his land. But he managed to return the amount the same year. A year later, the man again borrowed Rs 60,000 from Sitaben with his land serving as collateral. “I have given him a total of Rs 2 lakh till now and I will have to keep giving him money as he needs if I want to keep control of the land,” she said.
To ensure soil health, one of the primary goals of the government’s natural farming drive, it is important to have long-term control over the cultivated land. Farmers also often report reduced yield in the first few years of the transition and having sustained control over a piece of land for multiple years thus becomes even more important.
“In the first year, my yield had gone down,” said Sitaben.
The lack of land ownership has been a longstanding structural issue for women farmers like Sitaben. While more than 76% of rural women work in the agricultural sector, only a small proportion own land. This has alienated them from government schemes and benefits and other formal credit systems. Existing policies around natural farming also alienate women farmers by making land ownership mandatory, as we had reported in 2021.
Natural farming involves using dung and urine of indigenous cows to treat seeds (beejamrit), mixing it with pulse flour and jaggery to make fertilisers (jeevamrit) and mixing it with leaves, green chillies, garlic and neem leaves to make pesticides. Despite conflicting evidence about its success, the Indian government has been promoting this style of natural farming since 2019-20.
Last October, Behanbox travelled to villages in seven districts of Gujarat to assess the challenges faced by the women farmers of the area in adopting natural farming practices. In the first part of the series, we highlighted how women farmers need a science-driven information ecosystem to improve their soil quality and incomes. In this report, we will look at how land ownership affects access to schemes around natural farming and how in the absence of adequate support systems, personal networks and proximity to city centres determine the rates women farmers receive for their produce.
Land Ownership And Control
Five years ago, Radhaben Shaileshbhai, 43, started receiving training on how to make the shift from chemical-based to natural farming. “I was told that it is better for our health and that it also reduces costs,” she said. But her father-in-law refused outright her plans to make the switch to natural farming. “I own the land. Who are you to decide how we should grow?” she recalled him saying.
But she managed to convince him and now in half of the 2-acre farm in Mahisagar district’s Santrampur block, she only uses inputs made from buffalo dung and urine to grow crops that feed the family of six. “He saw how the soil quality has improved and is now inclined towards natural farming but we still use chemical fertilisers for the crops that we sell to ensure a good yield,” she said.
Radhaben’s husband had died eight years ago and two years ago, she asked her father-in-law to include her name in the land records. But he refused for the fear that she would remarry. “It took me 2-3 years to convince him and he agreed only when I said that I will also start getting Rs 2,000 from the PM-KISAN scheme and it will help me take care of my children,” she said.
Differences in national datasets mean that we do not have a clear idea of how much land women in India own. In an earlier series, we had reported (here and here) how women, especially from Dalit communities have to fight long battles to get ownership over the land they work on and how even ownership does not mean real control over the land.
As we said before, declining yield in the early years of transition to natural farming is a challenge most farmers have to deal with. Most women we interviewed spoke about reduced yields for different durations, ranging from 1 to 5 years. Radhaben said it took her almost five years to get the yield levels back up. “This period was difficult and often we had to buy food but I stuck with it because it is better for health,” she said.
Getting Premium Rates
While most women said that the yield increased after the initial blip, Fuliben Pagi’s husband said yield remained low, necessitating a higher sale price. In Mahisagar district’s Rambhemna Muvada village, 55-year-old Fuliben has a certified “model farm” and was awarded a Rs 13,500 incentive from the state’s Agricultural Technology Management Agency (ATMA). This year, the district officials had organised a haat or a temporary market to promote organic farmers and Fuliben was one of the four women farmers given a stall at the market.
At the stall, she sold 100 kg of millet at Rs 100/kg and maize at Rs 40-45/kg. In a common market where both kinds of produce sell, she would have got around Rs 20/kg for both. Higher rates for the produce was one of the core reasons that Prime Minister Modi listed while encouraging farmers to take up natural farming. But among all the women we interviewed, only Fuliben managed to get a better price. And this has to do with her personal networks.
“People know about us by now and call us to buy our produce,” interjected her husband. “There are government officials, doctors nearby who seek our produce. If that was not the case, we would not get such high rates.”
The lack of special markets to sell organic produce at a higher rate was echoed by all the farmers that we interviewed and it was also addressed in our earlier reporting on gendered barriers in adopting natural farming practices. This is the primary issue for 53-year-old Jagrutiben Gavit: she did not get a better price for her crops after she stopped using chemical fertilizers four years ago.
The local market refuses to pay a bigger price for organic produce and small farmers like her do not have enough yield to go to district markets. The cost of travel is another issue, she said.
The 2-acre farm Jagrutiben has in the hilly village of Kamalzari in Navsari district is split into multiple small farm plots scattered around her house. The land surrounding these patches are filled with trees, including tamarind, gooseberries and mangoes. These mangoes, along with the ones from her orchard, are an important cash crop for Jagrutiben.
The only time she experienced a special demand for her organic produce was when a family from Valsad bought 60 kg of mangoes from her. “My sister had told them about me and that is how they contacted me. They told my sister that they really liked the mangoes and they still are in contact with me and have said that they want to buy them next year as well,” said Jagrutiben.
She sold them the mangoes at the market rate but since the family came to the village to pick it up, she saved on the travel cost. “If I get organic certification, then I can set higher rates. Without proof, no one believes,” she said.
There are two certification systems in India, both are tedious and one is less popular and credible than the others, as we had reported in 2021. Over the last two years, Jagrutiben had been trying to get organic certification. She has all the papers ready but is waiting for government officials to come and test the land.
The NGO social worker who accompanied Behanbox and has been helping women in the area with land transfer documentation said she was also unsure how the process worked. None of the women we interviewed had any certification, except Fuliben who had the less credible group certification programme called Participatory Guarantee System-India (PGS). But even that certificate is with the gram sevak and has not reached her yet.
Sell Bio-inputs
In the post-election budget of 2024-25, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the government’s intent to transition one crore farmers to natural farming practices and setting up of 10,000 bio-resource centres (BRCs)
These BRCs are run by farmers or their groups and these set ups have large tanks and other fixed set ups enabling them to create their own bio-inputs in bulk. This creates a parallel source of income for farmers while also creating ready supply for others who want to save on the labour of making them.
In Mehsana’s Visnagar, 42-year-old Tarulataben Patel practices organic farming only on three of her 10-bigha farm. The remaining land has been leased out to tenant farmers and in addition to organic fertilisers, they also add chemical inputs. “They don’t have the time to take care of animals and make the inputs. So they go to the market and buy pesticides because they do not want to take the risk of losing the crops. Sometimes, if the crop is not growing well, they do add urea as well. They don’t want to compromise on their yield.”
Since 2016, Tarulataben and five other women of a self help group have been running a vermicompost and other bio-inputs enterprise and in the last year, the group earned a profit of Rs 5 lakh. “We recently sold 50 bags of vermicompost, each weighing 50 kg, for Rs 20,000,” she said.
Less than 100 km away from the capital city of Ahmedabad and less than half an hour away from Asia’s biggest spice market in Unjha, Tarulataben’s house and vermicompost shed is in a prominent area. “We also get a lot of customers because the nursery right next to the shed promotes us. Recently, a doctor came and bought 22 bags for his home garden,” she said. “We have also been promoting the products in meetings and now we get orders on Whatsapp from neighbouring villages.”
In contrast, in Bhavnagar’s Mamsa, krushi sakhis and farmers, Shilpaben and Harshaben, recently started a BRC but they are yet to build a customer base.
In 2020, the Chhattisgarh government, under the Godhan Nyay Yojana, started purchasing cattle dung from farmers, turning it into vermicompost and selling it back to the farmers. But since many farmers sold the manure after fulfilling their needs, there was a demand issue for the compost. Lessons from the scheme can be insightful in understanding the economic viability and feasibility of BRCs, Joshua Lobo, research associate and M Manjula, faculty at Azim Premji University wrote.
They also said that the government should standardise the recipes of bio-inputs and provide branding support to improve farmers’ trust in the inputs and for the success of the programme.
We believe everyone deserves equal access to accurate news. Support from our readers enables us to keep our journalism open and free for everyone, all over the world.
