Skilling Women Farmers in India to Earn an Income

Skilling for rural women farmers focuses on what are the challenges and needs being faced. After conducting surveys and field visits we have realized that a majority of the farmers are unable to achieve optimal yields. This directly impacts their income. Inorder to address this issue we have identified that farmers are not aware of their soil health and water quality. Due to lack of nutrients in the soil or saline water, farmers are experiencing crop failure. This clubbed with unseasonal rainfall and increasing temperature further makes it difficult to achieve optimal yields. Through our agriculture and soil center, we are providing women farmers with an understanding of scientific knowledge on their soil and water. This helps them not only to understand what their soil is lacking but also helps them to take action by applying the right nutrients in the right quantities to increase yields. In the next 6 months, we will be able to evaluate to what extent our farmers are being able to benefit from our intervention.

Links:

• Mann Deshi Foundation

Over the past two months, we have set up the Agriculture and Soil Testing Lab. The lab will begin testing from mid-November onwards. There is no such facility within a 500 km radius and small-holder farmers travel long and far to be able to get access to a testing facility.
The lab has been equipt with machines and testing equipment where we can test Ph levels, 36 micronutrients such as Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium and diagnose crop diseases. After the farmer gets a test report, they get information on what nutrients their soil is lacking and what nutrients their water is lacking. If the soil lacks essential nutrients, farmers are unable to harvest a good quality and healthy crop.

Our solution includes not only testing the soil and irrigation water to inform farmers on what their soi land water is lacking, but also providing expert advice to farmers as to what dosage of nutrients, fertilizers and pesticides their crop will require at different intervals of their crop cycle. By providing farming consultancy to farmers we will work with them to transition to organic farming to improve their soil health and reduce their carbon footprint.

We have a long way to go in ensuring that the Agriculture and Soil Testing Lab can efficiently continue operations. We are raising funds to cover the cost of software to capture data from testing, consultancy provided to farmers and impact experienced on the ground in terms of increase in yields, incomes and conversion to organic farming.

Links:

• Supporting Women Farmers to become Climate Heroes