FARMER'S OUTREACH PROGRAM

The most neglected people are the ones who bring food to our plates!

Farmers have lost large land holdings due to consecutive generations dividing their ancestral properties. The income is meager and there's no support to improve it. This project will work on farmer's income.

Farmers are the backbone of our country. The food on our plates every single morning after we wake up and the dinner at night before we go to bed is because of their hard work. No matter if the rains destroyed their harvest or they have a loan on their head, they don't give up to go out there to the fields and work, and that's why even if there are suicides happen every hour. Despite this there has been no adequate support from stakeholders to address this issue. Industrialist’s loans are waived off while the farmers are left to die.

One of the major problems that farmers face is the size of the landholdings. As generation passed by, the land got divided to smaller and smaller size. The amount of investment that a farmers puts doesn't really comes back. Bad rains and bad rates for their harvest has often put them into distress which over the years have snowballed into debts which has become impossible to repay. The soil has also degraded due to excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides which forces the farmers to use more of them for every new harvest.

The Farmer's Outreach Program aims at reaching out to farmers with small land holdings and encourages them to move towards Regenerative farming and Agro forestry. Doing so will not only enrich the soil over a period of time but it will ensure that farmers will be able to get a good chunk of returns when the harvest gets harvested. The farmers don't have to get a loan for every harvest that he does in year and worry about selling it. It cuts down on the labor costs as well. They also cut down heavily on the water requirement and they act as rainwater sequesters recharging the underground water table and also they will make sure the depleted rivers flow once again.

In the years to come people will slowly move to consumption of fruits as it has extra health benefits. Fruits bearing trees along with other medicinal plants in Regenerative farming ensured farmers get a side income all round the year. Timber grown this way will ensure that the requirement is now not met by cutting down forests.

The only thing that needs to be taken care is that the farmers get a minimum financial support for initial years of say 5 to 6 years till the farm starts generating a decent income.

One of the core works of FOP Project is to create a fund that would support the farmers in the initial years. This will also help them to take other aspects of agriculture such as animal husbandry or horticulture.

The farmers will now have ample amount of time once they move into Agro forestry or Regenerative farming. This workforce will then be put to something useful, such as producing Organic products. These farmers will also be grouped into FPOs (Farmer's Produce Organization) which will help them in all the aspects, right from training them with the necessary skills, procuring of raw materials, producing them, selling them and pooling the required money to carry these out. Forming FPOs will be another objective that will be taken up once we have good number of farmers who have moved to Agro forestry or Regenerative farming. These FPOs will also pool in money to buy farm equipments which can be used by the farmers of these FPOs and they don't have to exclusively invest for buying them.

The project will also work on pushing Governments for Green Credits by carrying out campaigns in creative ways.