Support and challenges

Governments help farmers in many ways: getting seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, weather forecasts, and research and training in new methods.

The government also gives cheaper electricity for irrigation, crop insurance through schemes like the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (if a crop fails, the farmer gets some money), and it buys important crops from farmers at a fair, fixed minimum price, so they can sell their harvest without trouble.

Cold storage, and better information and access to markets through digital technology, also help farmers get better prices.

Farming without soil is even possible: hydroponics grows plants in water with nutrients added, feeding the roots directly. It is used in controlled spaces, so it suits cities and places with poor soil.

Now the problems. Landholdings are shrinking: land is divided among family members each generation. The average farm is now about three-fourths of a hectare — about the size of one football field. (A hectare is 10,000 square metres.)

Farmers with small plots cannot earn much. It is also hard to use tractors and other machines, which are made for big farms and are costly to buy or rent. (Lately, machines for small farms are being designed too.)

Farming families have always had other sources of income: cows, goats, poultry, beekeeping, fishing, fruit and timber trees on the edges of fields. Variety makes them stronger in bad years. But today even this is often not enough for a decent life.

Farmers also face climate change: weather is harder to predict (rain at the wrong time), and extreme events like severe droughts and very heavy rain are more frequent, so crops are more likely to be destroyed. Hard times push farmers to take loans, which many then struggle to repay — a debt trap. As a result, by some estimates as many as 2,300 farmers a day have had to give up farming. And the Ganga basin, which feeds over 500 million people, is struggling to refill itself, with melting glaciers, water taken for irrigation, groundwater pumped out and hundreds of dams. Still, with new approaches like those in this chapter, there is hope that farming will flourish across India.