Techie-turned farmer promotes natural farming
Anantapur: The Uppanethalapalle Natural Farmers Producers Mutually Aided Cooperative Society, which is a federation and network of natural farmers in the district is aggressively promoting the concept of organic farming under the leadership of a young IT professional turned natural farmer Parthasaradhi, who has even created a marketing platform for organic farmers who are part of his network.
In a span of two years after his quitting his techie job, Parthasaradhi himself took to natural farming in his 30 acres of land and began to project his own farm as a model farm. Determined to pass on the benefits to co-farmers, he built a mass movement with the involvement of organic farmers and today he has established a strong network of farmers.
He shuttles between Anantapur and Bengaluru to build a market for organic products and for exporting the same to countries abroad. Parthasaradhi having a fascination for rural life and agriculture has embarked upon creating networks of natural farmers spread in the twin states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and at any given time is able to communicate with thousands of farmers.
The society he registered is now dealing with finding marketing avenues to its members either in Hyderabad or Bengaluru. In the Garden city, he has linked his society with corporate malls including Big Basket, 24 Mantra, Reliance, and hundreds of organic shops in the city. He also has an understanding with 10 gated communities having a minimum of 300 to 5,000 homes, who liked the organic products supplied by his society.
Most of his individual consumers directly gives online orders and collect them directly from his village godown. Being an IT professional he is labouring day and night to rope in all natural farmers on a single platform and with the express purpose of creating a web of networks of natural farmers for facilitating the ease of doing good business and easy marketing of the various farmers products including papayya, pomegranate and sweet lime and also vegetables including tomatoes, chillies and onions apart from millets, pulses and rice.
The quest for finding marketing avenues to make the natural farming movement a big success has constrained the campaigner to create networks of natural farmers and link them with individual consumers as well as market forces. Unless the farmers find marketing avenues, the natural farming movement would die a slow death, says Parthasaradhi, the founder of the Uppanethalapalle MACS. Marketing is where everyone had failed, and we would succeed where everyone failed, a confident Parthasaradhi avers.
A farmer of Uppanethipalle, Kishore Kumar said that he is growing papayya in 10 acres of land and is totally organic. However, initially he had a hard time trying to find market for his crop at one go. After coming to know of the natural farmers network created by the proud son of Uppanethalapalle soil, he joined the federation of farmers both online and offline.
Now, my fruit is being marketed hassle-free to Bengaluru, a beaming Reddy adds. The district administration through the department of Agriculture is also promoting natural farming cluster villages which will raise plantations and agriculture crops through natural farming manure. Agriculture Officer Laxma Naik revealed that in each cluster 10 villages have adopted natural farming methods and techniques.
In each cluster 4,550 farmers from 10 villages will be implementing the natural farming methods. Already 10 clusters are operating and demarcated as natural farming zone involving about 50,000 farmers and covering 2.5 lakh acres. The villages include Vajrakarur, Kambaduru, Raptadu, Somandepalle, Amadaguru, Madakasira and other surrounding villages.
By Ravi P Benjamin