Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
innovations and local-level empowerment, both built up through years
of mobilization and fostered through government reforms, educational
programs, and government agencies.
When I finally reached Padayeti ater the long, hot drive, I was
greeted by Suresh, a staff member at Thanal who had been living in the
village for several months to assist with monitoring and implementing
the Biodiversity Board's organic farming pilot. An activist by training, he
had setled contentedly into village life . He said that he was active within
the community of sixty-
six families who were participating in the pilot.
His community outreach on behalf of Thanal had included organizing
a regular topic swap among young adults in the pilot area to encourage
reading, leading field trips for children to the park nearby to teach them
about biodiversity and natural history, and giving families lessons on how
to easily cultivate vegetable gardens for personal consumption in their
yards, maintain organic paddy fields, and produce organic farm inputs.
As a result of Suresh's and Thanal's activities, the majority of the farmers
now had kitchen gardens filled with organic vegetables in their backyards,
and they had become familiar with organic input production methods.
According to the Biodiversity Board's interim report on the pilot project:
“A marked change in the skills and knowledge of the farmers regarding
farming, especially organic farming is seen. . . . Farmers also reported
beter understanding of paddy cultivation, especially the importance of
looking at it from an ecosystem basis.”6
Acquainted with every participating farmer, Suresh took me on a tour
of the plots—a hundred acres of flat paddy fields surrounded by rocky
hills. Most of our stops involved the inputs that participating farmers
were applying to their fields. We first visited two vermicompost tanks
in a farmer's yard, filled with composting worms digesting food scraps
(fig. 3). In 2009, the Biodiversity Board subsidized twenty such tanks for
the pilot project, thirteen of which produced eleven tons of compost in
2010. To supplement the early stages of vermicompost output, the board
had also shipped in additional organic compost for the pilot area, about
one ton per acre.7
