Out of a few questions that I was asked from a group of people on agriculture and allied subjects, the most common question was circling around the current practice of farming that is clearly visible of monoculture. I have put the word visible in bold. As I would like to bring a certain context to this in my article eventually. What is visible to what is ground reality may be two different things. And I would like to bring about this difference in my explanation to the visibility around monoculture. In continuation with this there was a question related to this topic on monoculture generally tied to large scale farming. We will also try to understand how the risks in agriculture pans out for the farmers of certain size and at a certain location, to take certain decisions.
The next most common response I have received was to understand better on the farming pattern of cultivating same crop specific to a geography and eventually ending up loosing price to excessive supply to market. Oh! There are generations of people trying to address this issue. I am only exaggerating the issue, but it deserves this kind of attention.
Okay, let us begin.
I will take a use case of cotton and sugarcane to open up and see issues of all that is asked and mentioned above. But before, let us build some context to this. One thing is clear, that monoculture will not help add more nutrients to the soil. One of the research papers on Monoculture published in Science Direct mentions the following, 'Monoculture/ solely crop production farms are the farming types by which farmers grow only crops, both annual crops/trees and field crops, such as wheat, corn, rice, rapeseed, sugar cane, and cotton. Monoculture is widely used in industrial farming systems, including conventional and organic farming, and has allowed increased efficiency in planting and harvest. Continuous monoculture, or “monocropping” where the same species is grown year after year, can lead to unsustainable environments such as building up disease pressure and reducing particular nutrients in the soil.' (Ref 01).
I will place the context of cotton farmers in the Khedbrahma district of Gujurat state (bordering Rajasthan) and sugarcane growers in the Mandya region of Karnataka. The profile of cotton growers considered are, farmers with an average land holding less than 2 acres and the sugarcane growers in Mandya, considered to have an average land holding of 8 to 10 acres. The interesting contrast here is that at both geographies, it is monoculture. And now we will try to understand how various scenarios have led these two contrasting farmers in two very contrasting geographies to adopt monoculture. With what I have seen so far, it is clear that monoculture isn't a virtue of a big farmer or group of big farmers alone. Now, why does a farmer (whether big or small) look at monoculture as an option. Lets get this straight first. It is not that the farmer is not aware of this. S/ he may not be in a position to write a Science Direct paper about the science behind it, but the farmer knows. The profound science that it is, agriculture has been passed on from one generation to another, not by theory, but by practice. It is in a farmer's know how about the soil and the wind, that resides a lot of good farming practices. However unfortunately, it is the market that drives the decisions. When i say market it sounds very abrupt right now. But let me break it down for you. (Do not get upset that I am taking time to talk about the cotton and sugarcane farmers. Hey, what's the point of a discussion without a premise and a context)
A farmer understands the agriculture s/ he is doing is at the end of the day a source of livelihood. Unless, you are a highly paid workforce in a metro, who buys a farm land, for the fantasies of it and claim to be a farmer, visiting the farm once a month and engaging a landless labour family at the farm after constructing a barbed electric wire fence with a gate to the farm. So, this source of livelihood needs more attention. When it is a source of livelihood, the purpose is to address the recurring expenses of the farmer's personal life and also be in a position to save for a hopeful bright future. And this brings us to two points - one, is the need for stability in this source of livelihood and second is to reduce the recurring expenses so that one can save better. And the whole effort is to make agriculture as predictable as possible. How else one will bring in stability to operations?
What monoculture does excellently well, is to bring in an element of predictability to the farmer. A farmer will exactly know the volumes of inputs needed for that year. The buyers of annual crops are generally industries and big processing units who can afford to provide the necessary buy back guarantees to the farmer and also credit to buy inputs. Now we are stepping on two different stones at the same time, in our effort to understand the farmer's perspective towards monoculture. And now is the time to look at the two profiled farmers and their story.
In Khedbrahma, there is a Producer Company of over 12000 farmers (tribal farmers) whose average land holding is less than 2 acres. Literally 90% of them are less than 2 acre farmers. Out of which, around 60% of them are less than 1 acre farmers. And, sorry, no prizes to guess what they are growing. Cotton. You can imagine a less than 1 acre and 2 acre farmer growing just cotton. Why? Does cotton reap the highest benefit than any other crops? Are farmers there just lazy to multi-crop? What will they eat on a daily basis, are they growing anything for self consumption? I am sure, these are some of the questions that would have knocked your doors by now. All these farmers are generally Maize and Wheat growers. And these crops were dictated by their diet. And mostly they were growing maize and wheat and were storing for their self consumption through the year. And whatever else they wanted to purchase, it was bartered. In June of 2021, barter is still on. And a few years ago, with the boom of textile industries, things changed. A Indian Brand Equity Foundation report mentions that 'India’s textiles industry contributed 7% to the industry output (by value) in 2018-19. The Indian textiles and apparel industry contributed 2% to the GDP, 12% to export earnings and held 5% of the global trade in textiles and apparel in 2018-19..... Cotton production is expected to reach 36.0 million bales and consumption is expected to reach 114 million bales in FY21—13% growth over the previous year.' (Ref 02).
This also increased the requirement of cotton seeds. This led to more and more farmers started changing to cultivating cotton, looking at raise in market acceptance. In khedbrahma region, cotton was now grown more for the production of seeds rather than the cotton itself. To have stability to the respective textile businesses, cotton seed manufacturers started identifying regions such as Khedbrahma, rich in black soil, perfect for cotton cultivation and established a network of traders who would supply to them cotton with seeds. Which the seed company would separate it from the pods to treat and package the seeds, that will be eventually sold back to the farmers itself. And the cotton generally sold to industries in Coimbatore and other places in India, along with export to countries like Bangladesh. The 100% FDI approval for textiles in India, may also have been the reason for the multi nationals to set up seed manufacturing companies. Now what is happening with respect to the cotton grower and monoculture? Once a maize grower is now, getting a monetary value out of growing cotton. How? The trader that interfaces between the farmer and the seed company is offering credit to the farmer. And because the trader has a clear forward purchase orders from the seed company, the trader is offering the farmer a buy back guarantee. One may ask, what if the crop fails. The penalties on interest failure will still be put on the farmer upto 2% per month, but the credit will still be provided for a fresh crop, the following year. You see, how market conditions are fixing up over 10000 farmers in one single area alone, to get to monoculture. The next question is, if the credit issue of the farmers are addressed, will they shift back to multi cropping? it is difficult. As there is no scale with a land holding of under 2 acres. Okay what are our options then? Can the farmer look at horticulture to better the cashflows to under 3 months and completely avoid the necessity of credit. Possible. But there are a lot of obligations that the farmer should now address, before one decides to break into the existing structure. At this point what is visible is the farmers are getting into cotton even with under 2 acres of land holding and neglecting other sustainable options. When it is a question of ones own survival, the approach is always short term. Unfortunately sustainability is always a matter of long term. Immediate actions towards sustainability aren't always lucrative and risk free. It is a big challenge. Where do you start now? Awareness on multi cropping and organic farming or provide a solution to their vicious credit cycles with the traders so that they have better cashflows by the virtue of their own cultivation? For a small farmer predictability and sustainability is still a far fetched dream. S/ he knows, that it is the right thing to do. Clearly. But it is still a dream for most of them.
Now looking at a big farmer in Mandya of Karnataka, cultivating sugarcane, who are all erstwhile Finger millet cultivators, just by the stroke of political interests and the establishments of sugar mills in the area, changed the entire agro-economic dynamics of the region. Waiting for a year to see some cashflow was affordable. As the buy backs solved a lot of risks and predictability concerns, for a big farmer, it became too convenient for the big farmer to stick to cultivating sugarcane. the requirement of inputs streamlined. The markets gathered in one place, in proximity. The sugar mills, harvested and picked up sugarcanes from the farm level. Scale, helped the sugar mills, to offer the services they were able to offer, in terms of labour to harvest and trucks to transport. the political dimension that let water to the area, also played a major role in developing state of the art irrigation facilities and risks reduced. Farmers know monoculture is not a good thing to the soil. Whether it is a small farmer or a big farmer, the strive for better livelihood, always seem to win over good-to-soil farming practices. A crop like a finger millet that hardly required water and grew well on rainfed lands, now needed extreme amount of water to cultivate sugarcane. And growing just sugarcane throughout the year across all the area, flows into the fact that the weed management becomes very easy. You will have similar type of pests of insects attacking the crop. And it becomes easy and convenient to go for a set type of pesticides. and when a market develops for it in a region, you will see a lot of farmers taking up the same thing. Convenience towards a stable livelihood beats a lot of other pressing factors towards better decision making.
As mentioned above about the case of neighboring farmers growing the same crop; it is an issue arising due to lack of information flow between supply and demand. In reality this imbalance is largely managed by the middlemen who are in between the market and the farmers, largely for crops where there is no government procurement (like maize, wheat etc). Considering a tomato farmer for example, it is painful to see farmers from the kolar belt of Karnataka mostly, throwing tomatoes on the road when the prices hit Rs 2 per kg at retail. That is obscene. Can a Minimum selling price be got into all the crops that farmer grows? It sounds too real to be true, at this moment. Can a single enterprise control this flow of information between supply demand? That is too much of a monopoly over the most sensitive component of the farmer's life. Can there be multiple enterprises having their own market demands and trying to address this flow of information to the supply and hence push farmers to grow to their demand needs, thereby stopping neighbouring farmers to follow patterns?
These are questions that can be answered by clearly grouping demand and moderating the flow of information to the supply side, considering geographies, that includes, type of soil, possibilities of ethical credit linkages to farmers, buy back guarantees that provisions in its terms and conditions a clear insurance cover to the farmer upon crop loss, and many more factors. It is easy to push a farmer to grow a crop that is different from what is grown by his/ her neighbouring farmer. You see, the farmers also follow trends. They visit the APMCs regularly and are getting daily price changes on their phones. Now a days these are mostly smartphones. Rural is well connected. Images of APMC price list is forwarded in all the groups that farmers are a part of on whatsapp. They follow, what the middlemen want. They see, how the price of tomato is stable for over 2 to 3 months now and then they decide to crop. And during harvest time, sometimes, they dont even harvest it. Looking at the price, they will prepare the land by running over the plants with tomatoes in it, considering it is good fertiliser for the next crop. And they do not want to delay the cropping cycle for the next one. The time to market is defined by a lot of factors here and although storage and value addition are options to farmers, the lack of scale and higher cost for storage and the lack of technology and lack of access to market for value addition does not allow them to look at these two as options, even if they are aspiring to do both. The tomatoes eventually go back to the soil. Lot of work needs to be done. There are multiple startups today trying to address this problem.
And which flows into the other set of questions I will address in the Part 02 of this article on role of technology in farming and output business for farmers that includes processing, packaging and distribution.
References:
01 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/monoculture
02 - https://www.ibef.org/industry/textiles.aspx
03. https://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/displaybitstream?handle=1/83778&fileid=cc855572-5b99-43e9-8612-b48f3570b073
(Leaving with you a thesis for a good read on Mandya sugarcane story)
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