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A state government helps farmers go organic

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Catching Green

  • State-promoted organic farming has picked up in a big way in Andhra Pradesh
  • The CMSA programme was initiated in 2004 across a mere 400 acres in
    12 villages.
  • Today, it covers 17 lakh acres in over 4,000 villages in the state. The number of farmers participating in CMSA has risen to more than 6 lakh.

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Call it going back to the roots. Or call it giving the Indian farmer his rightful due. The community-managed sustainable agriculture (CMSA) programme of Andhra Pradesh is low on cost, high on returns and is billed as the second Green Revolution. It’s a model that could possibly take on the Bt brinjal brigade simply by replacing the use of chemical pesticides with a combination of physical and biological measures, including eco-friendly bio-pesticides.

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The Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty, which implements CMSA on behalf of the government, calls it India’s largest ecologically driven agricultural programme. It was begun in 2004 as an initiative to counter farmer suicides and implemented on 400 acres in a dozen villages. Now, it’s being practised by over 6 lakh farmers on 17 lakh acres. The programme has over the last six years reached 4,025 villages in 21 of the 23 districts of the state. The idea of teaching farmers to cultivate without pesticides was first tested by the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture (CSA), an independent research institute.

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So what exactly are bio-pesticides? These are locally available organic materials that do not harm the health of the farmers, do not affect the yield and do not pollute the environment. Among the bio-pesticides in use are extracts of chillies and garlic, neem seeds, cowdung and cow’s urine, milk, ghee, fish, jaggery, yoghurt, lime, eggs, custard apples and so on. The CMSA model encourages a tapering off of the use of pesticides, but once that’s done, they do without fertilisers too and go completely organic. About 150 villages in the CMSA model have gone fully organic till date; and many are already 60-75 per cent organic.

G.V. Ramanjaneyulu, executive director of the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, says some farmers in Maharashtra and Punjab practise non-pesticide farming, but the Andhra Pradesh government has taken it up on a large scale. This is significant, because the state is the highest consumer of pesticides in India at 0.82 kg/hectare against the national average of 0.3 kg/hectare.

Some of the crops grown under CMSA are paddy, red gram, groundnut, cotton, jowar, bajra, sunflower, castor, turmeric, chillies and vegetables. Citing the example of brinjal, Ramanjaneyulu says pesticides tend to be ineffective with brinjal because the borer pest enters the fruit at an early stage. “We may keep spraying from the outside, but nothing happens to the pest.” Farmers in this programme use innovative methods like pheromone and light traps, besides bio-pesticides. They report great results.

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Prakriti Atithidevobhava, a CMSA resource centre, has reported success in growing brinjal with no pesticides or chemical fertilisers. D. Pari Naidu, a farmer of Thotapalli village of Vijayanagaram district, grew brinjal over five months in a multi-cropping pattern. He used seeds collected from tribals of the district and used cowdung, cow urine, neem cakes and silt from water tanks to fertilise the plot. Each plant yielded 50 kg of brinjal in five months—which experts declared as phenomenal.

T. Vijay Kumar, CEO of the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty,  says that once farmers learn these practices, they disseminate the knowledge to others. Farmers also do their own research and come up with original solutions. “The beauty of CMSA is that farmers are self-reliant in terms of knowledge and inputs. This is why it is spreading from one farmer to another,” he says.

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