The Government of Andhra Pradesh (GoAP), Department of Agriculture (DoA) is implementing Andhra Pradesh ‘Zero-Budget’ Natural Farming (APZBNF) Programme, through Rythu Sadhikara Samstha (RySS) (corporation for farmers’ empowerment). RySS is a not-for-profit organization established by GoAP. The programme has been initiated in 2015-16 with multiple objectives of enhancing farmers’ welfare, consumer welfare and for the conservation of the environment.
Zero-Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) is a holistic alternative to the present paradigm of high-cost chemical inputs-based agriculture. It is very effective in addressing the uncertainties of climate change. ZBNF principles are in harmony with the principles of Agroecology. Its uniqueness is that it is based on the latest scientific discoveries in Agriculture, and, at the same time it is rooted in Indian tradition. UN-FAO in April 2018 urged all countries to move towards the adoption of Agroecology to meet the twin goals of global food security and conservation of the environment.
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In the 1960s, the Green Revolution had a phenomenal impact on India’s food production, but it also made the land infertile, led to extensive water consumption and exacerbated groundwater loss. It also led to widespread use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers. In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, water scarcity and poor soil quality forced many farmers to walk away from agriculture. They were perennially buried under a vicious debt cycle, with most of their earnings funnelled into buying pesticides and fertilisers.
But a few years ago, the state launched an ambitious programme called Zero Budget Natural Farming that is transforming things on the ground. The idea is simple: to stop the dependency on chemicals and revive the land. It’s already starting to show results.
Andhra Pradesh is now well on its way to becoming India’s first 100 percent organic farming state, as our correspondents report.
Video: India’s organic farming revolution
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Vijay Kumar, Vice President Zero Budget Natural Farming
Like many other States, Andhra Pradesh is known for indiscriminate use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to the extent that residues found their way into mothers’ milk in a few villages in Guntur. As Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) takes root in Andhra Pradesh, promising to move away from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and rejuvenate the degraded soil, a retired civil servant, T. Vijay Kumar, is leading the project.
What is the mission?
Mr. Kumar is being seen as the prime mover of the ZBNF as Andhra Pradesh inches towards becoming India’s first natural farming State, covering 60 lakh farmers and 12,294 gram panchayats by 2024, and 80 lakh hectares or 90% of the cultivable area by 2026.
For Mr. Kumar, a 1983-batch IAS officer, heralding a natural farming era is a dream and comes at the end of a long career, 28 years of which were spent on the Tribal, Rural and Agriculture Development Departments. After retiring in September 2016, he became adviser to the government on agriculture and vice-chairman of the Rythu Sadhikara Samstha, a not-for-profit company set up by the government to usher in natural farming. According to Mr. Kumar, “’for both farmers and consumers, natural farming is a win-win situation.” Simply put, the ZBNF is a practice that believes in natural growth of crops without fertilizer and pesticide or any other “foreign” elements. The inputs used for seed treatments and other inoculations are cow dung and cow urine. Vidarbha farmer and Padma Shri awardee Subhash Palekar, the biggest champion of the ZBNF, pioneered a cow dung- and cow urine-based concept for seed treatment, inoculation, mulching and soil aeration.
How did he spread the word?
Mr. Kumar realised that to promote the ZBNF, he would have to speak to the farmer in a language he understands. He prompted the Agriculture Department to identify community resource persons or ‘champion farmers’ from the villages who would motivate other farmers to achieve the ultimate goal of ‘biovillages’ (the entire village taking to natural farming) in phases. The initial committed group of 800, trained in natural farming, were used as CRPs to spread the concept. After preparatory work, this massive task began with Mr. Palekar’s eight-day training for 5,000 farmers in the ZBNF in January 2016. By the end of 2017, 40,000 farmers in 704 villages were covered, 2017-18 saw 1,63,000 being roped in at 972 villages, and during the current year the target is 5,00,000 farmers in 3,015 villages.
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Articles
What is zero budget natural farming?
A cotton field in Andhra PradeshWill this form of chemical-free agriculture increase farmers’ incomes? Where are the pitfalls?
The story so far: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman thrust zero budget farming into the spotlight in the first Budget speech of the 17th Lok Sabha earlier this month, calling for a “back to the basics” approach. She said, “We need to replicate this innovative model through which in a few States, farmers are already being trained in this practice. Steps such as this can help in doubling our farmers’ income in time for our 75th year of Independence.” Several States, including Andhra Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, have been aggressively driving a shift towards this model.
What is it and how did it come about?
Zero budget natural farming (ZBNF) is a method of chemical-free agriculture drawing from traditional Indian practices.
It was originally promoted by Maharashtrian agriculturist and Padma Shri recipient Subhash Palekar, who developed it in the mid-1990s as an alternative to the Green Revolution’s methods driven by chemical fertilizers and pesticides and intensive irrigation. He argued that the rising cost of these external inputs was a leading cause of indebtedness and suicide among farmers, while the impact of chemicals on the environment and on long-term fertility was devastating. Without the need to spend money on these inputs — or take loans to buy them — the cost of production could be reduced and farming made into a “zero budget” exercise, breaking the debt cycle for many small farmers.
Instead of commercially produced chemical inputs, the ZBNF promotes the application of jeevamrutha — a mixture of fresh desi cow dung and aged desi cow urine, jaggery, pulse flour, water and soil — on farmland. This is a fermented microbial culture that adds nutrients to the soil, and acts as a catalytic agent to promote the activity of microorganisms and earthworms in the soil. About 200 litres of jeevamrutha should be sprayed twice a month per acre of land; after three years, the system is supposed to become self-sustaining. Only one cow is needed for 30 acres of land, according to Mr. Palekar, with the caveat that it must be a local Indian breed — not an imported Jersey or Holstein.
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Going back to the roots with natural farming
- Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her speech of Budget 2019-2020 emphasised the practice of Zero Budget Natural Farming, a type of farming which involves elimination of chemical pesticides, sustaining agriculture with eco-friendly processes, and restoring soil fertility and organic matter.
- In Pichompa Kalan village of Haryana, Asha practices zero budget natural farming on her plot of three acres where she grows fruits, vegetables and pulses.
- While farmers like Asha, practicing zero budget natural farming, have found success, various challenges like a long transition period and a limited market have restricted the spread of the practice to only about 0.1% of the total cultivators in India.
Asha’s husband did not believe her initially. Neither did most of her neighbours in Pichompa Kalan, Haryana. An orchard of citrus fruits, mangoes, watermelons, amla, jamun, apricot, pulses and cereals—how could that grow given the limited productivity of red and clayey soil of the region?
But for the last 10 years, Asha, with help from her family as well as hired labour, has been growing all of that and more. And the trademark of these crops — they have been grown with chemical-free inputs. This is akin to what Nirmala Sitharaman, the Finance Minister in her speech of Budget 2019-2020 mentioned, when she said, “We shall go back to basics on one count: Zero Budget Farming.” This type of farming emphasises on the elimination of chemical pesticides, sustaining agriculture with eco-friendly processes, and restoring soil fertility and organic matter.
About 25 kilometers from the district headquarters of Haryana’s Charkhi-Dadri, Pichompa Kalan is home to about 3,200 people. A negligible number of them practice chemical-free farming. Amongst them are Asha and her daughter-in-law, Jyoti, who spend time every morning and evening in their three killa (three acres) of land, pulling out unwanted weeds. The trees of lemons, oranges, sweet limes are interspersed with vegetables like spinach, methi (fenugreek), and pulses like chana (gram), bajra (pearl millet), and wheat. She is also currently experimenting with custard apples within the same fields. Intercropping, growing multiple non-competing crops in proximity, is considered to be an important aspect of zero budget natural farming.
The farms also require constant attention; one attack by pests is enough to ruin the entire crop. To avert pests from attacking, Asha resorts to a spray made of buttermilk, which is kept in a mud pot immersed in cowdung for about 3 months. Another method to keep the pests away is to burn guggal, a resin available from trees. “Our grandmothers used to prescribe this method of burning guggal during the flowering stage,” she said.
To increase the fertility of the soil, she uses jeevamrut which is a concoction of cow dung, cow urine, gram flour, jaggery and water after letting it prepare for the same duration. She adds this to the soil once every two months. For the same purpose, she also prepared vermicompost. Everything that Asha needs as manure, and to keep the pests away is available at home. Her expenditure on inputs then is almost zero. “This type of farming may have low investment, but requires a lot more hard work and labour,” Jyoti adds.
Like most of the farmers in the village, Asha too depends on her tube well for irrigation, but with a variation. The economic survey 2018-19 claimed that 89% of groundwater extracted in the country is used for irrigation, and it further suggested that the focus should shift to irrigation water productivity from land productivity and thrust should be on micro-irrigation. Zero budget natural farming also calls for water-efficiency. Asha and team thus, have been practicing sprinkler and drip irrigation.
In her budget speech, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had gone ahead to say, “Steps such as this can help in doubling our farmers’ income in time for our 75th year of Independence.” While Asha’s land gives her a variety of organic produce, if it can really double a farmer’s income, or can be scaled-up, are questions without an easy answer.
The initial shift
In the early years of the farm, a labourer had quit because he did not believe that the farm could grow without use of DAP (a phosphorous-based fertiliser) and urea. Jyoti Awasthi, Founder-Director of Satat Sampada, a social enterprise to promote organic farming also noticed the same while working with farmers in Uttar Pradesh. “They were absolutely unsure about working without fertilisers, DAP and urea,” she said. “They have really lost the trust that agriculture can happen without these.”
The initial two years of gestation period, which is the time taken for a farmer to shift to zero-chemical farming and for their soil to be completely free of chemicals, is a challenging time. For these first two years, since the soil takes time to respond to the shift from chemical inputs to organic ones, the produce falls lower — sometimes as low as 40% of what the farmer was receiving with the conventional farming methods. Needless to say, many farmers drop out during this phase.
Asha began her organic farm as a hobby. For those who are dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, the initial years of lower productivity, the risks of a pest attack and the high requirement of labor are costs that they simply cannot afford.
In Uttar Pradesh, when Awasthi showed farmers the chemical-free produce of her own eight acres of demonstration plot, they looked at the quality of the soil and the grain and exclaimed, “This is so beautiful, ours is not as good.” Slow confidence building, and hand-holding through the process allowed for the adoption of change.
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Zero-budget natural farming brought big gains for Andhra farmers, shows study
Paddy farmers save water, energy and money by adopting this farming approach, the study points out
Agriculture is both the cause and victim of water scarcity. Excessive use of water threatened the sustainability of livelihoods dependent on water and agriculture, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
In India, the Green Revolution had a phenomenal impact on India’s food production, but it also rendered the land infertile, led to extensive water consumption and aggravated groundwater loss.
The country’s agriculture sector already consumed over 83 per cent of the available water resources, according to the Central Water Commission. And the demand will grow.
In the recent past, there was a global demand to shift to sustainable farming systems, such as zero-budget natural farming (ZBNF). India, too, introduced ZBNF in its Union Budget 2019-20.
As the name suggests, it is the adaptation of an ancient practice that reduces farmers’ direct cost and encourages them to use natural inputs, such as cow dung and cow urine. The inputs help manage soil nutrition, fertility, pests and seeds.
The technology requires less tilling and completely rejects the use of inorganic fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. It is also water-efficient. Of late, all these benefits were popularised, but in 2019, a group of researchers tried to quantify it.
Researchers at Bengaluru-based technology-policy think-tank Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy conducted an exploratory study in Andhra Pradesh to compare ZBNF and non-ZBNF techniques in paddy, groundnut, chilli, cotton and maize farming.
The comparison was made on six parameters: Water, electricity, energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, yield and net revenue.
The study — published February 2020 — was conducted in Andhra Pradesh’s Anantapuramu, Prakasam, Vizianagaram and West Godavari districts during kharif season, ensuring variation in agro-climatic zones, farming techniques, production and social aspects.
It found maximum benefits of ZBNF in paddy farming, with a saving of 1,400 to 3,500 cubic metres of water per acre per paddy cropping period (one acre equals 0.4 hectare).
This was accomplished by increasing the time interval of irrigation cycles — every eight to 10 days — unlike the conventional method that required watering every five to six days. Water saving was attributed to the multiple aeration practice. This water management method involves periodic aeration of the soil between watering periods.
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Zero budget natural farming good for soil, but may leave India hungry: Study
Potential yield challenges to scale-up of zero budget natural farming
Videos
In Hindi – No English.
This talk is about “Zero Budget Natural Farming”, a zero investment way of maximising farm yield. He also draws environmental concerns and motivates the audience to take up agriculture as their occupation.
