From a community of organic farmers to a community of progressive farmers
At Seed Savers Club, we recently made a small pivot from being a community of organic farmers to a community of progressive farmers. It is a small change per se but I believe it still requires some clarification on how it impacts our vision and road to that.
Vision of Seed Savers Club
Seed Savers Club was formed with a vision of transforming the agricultural landscape of India and hence creating a social and environmental impact. To achieve this vision we need to help millions of our farmers diversify to financially and ecologically sustainable agriculture practices.
The direction we started with
We started with promoting and supporting organic farming as it did promise sustainability and hence we ended up building a strong community of organic farmers. As we spent more and more time with these farmers we got aware of the major problems they faced and our own constraints in being able to solve them. The simplest one of them being access to market linkages. While it was making our journey tough, we still continued with the belief that by building our leverages over time we can solve this problem too.
A reality check
Probably the biggest reality check for us was a field visit to one of our vocal community member, Sumer Singh, who has been the biggest promoter and supporter of sustainable organic practices. Half of his field was empty and his onion from last crop was still hanging in storage waiting to be sold. Some of it rotten and some of it germinating. Going sustainable surely had made him more resilient as he didn’t have any more loans to pay off. He could choose not to sell his crop until he got the price he demanded. But to us it wasn’t enough. We want him to earn more and not just spend less.
The larger picture
The larger picture behind this is that when you travel along the highways and railway networks of northern India, you find a huge continuous landmass with a single crop being cultivated. This is what is truly detrimental to the growth of farmers. And story of Sumer Singh will not inspire these millions of farmers to switch to a new set of practices. And even if they did switch to sustainable practices but keep growing the same old crops, there won’t be much change in their financial or ecological situation.
What it takes to bring a huge change
So we asked ourselves, what it takes to bring a huge change to an ecosystem like Indian agriculture. And we do have a wonderful case study and it is called the Green Revolution. What we understood about what made Green Revolution a huge success was that government took entire responsibility from seed to market. Government provided hybrid seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, promoted them through a huge army of extension officers and then procured the same for PDS.
The way forward
A lot of different signals led us to our way forward. We are now focusing on specific value chains which have a considerable RoI (>2x of investment). We will focus on providing end to end support to farmers by building a network to source inputs and sell produce of our member farmers.
How to approach ecological impact
While we do understand that many of these value chains will not directly create a huge ecological impact but most of these can be done using sustainable practices without having any impact on financial returns. And that is what we are going to focus on.
Further, once our farmers start getting a good returns from these value chains through sustainable practices they will find it easier to adopt sustainable practices across the board.
