The University has deepened its collaboration with the Government of Andhra Pradesh to support through the signing of an MoU with Rythu Sadhikara Samstha.
The University of Birmingham has deepened its collaboration with the Government of Andhra Pradesh to support pioneering research and scaling of natural farming innovations through the signing of an MoU with Rythu Sadhikara Samstha, the implementing agency for the state government’s Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) programme. The state government in Andhra Pradesh has for over a decade been responding to the growing ecological and economic crisis in agriculture through promoting the transition to chemical free, natural farming, which fully phases out the use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and weedicides, aiming to reach all 6 million farmers in the state by 2035. The Government aims in the process, to reduce the costs of cultivation, improve yields and soil health, and enable farmers to receive more remunerative returns.
We at RySS are very happy with the collaboration with the University of Birmingham. Our plan is to incubate APCNF in as many different agro ecological conditions in the country as possible and have academic institutions to evaluate this in farmers' fields and disseminate the findings widely. This partnership enables us to test APCNF in Bihar and West Bengal
This MoU will operate for the next three years. Led by Dr Fraser Sugden in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, a series of joint field trials will be implemented, supported by APCNF community resource persons (farmers trained to scale the natural farming innovations). The resource persons will work in established field sites where the Dr Sugden’s team has been supporting a network of farmer collectives since 2015. Farmers will be trained in a range of natural farming techniques, which involve radically different methods of soil, nutrient, water and crop management on an experimental basis. Documentation of the results and implementation will be supported by North Bengal Agricultural University, and NGOs, the Centre for the Development of Human Initiatives and Sakhi (Bihar).
At a time when farmers are experiencing unprecedented stress due to rising costs of inputs, alongside declining soil health, this collaboration offers us an outstanding opportunity to pilot groundbreaking natural farming techniques, and integrate them with innovations in land and water management
This MoU, and the joint field trials will open up opportunities to understand firstly how the groundbreaking natural farming transition in Andhra Pradesh can be rolled out in West Bengal and Bihar, which differ ecologically and in terms of socioeconomic context than Andhra Pradesh. Secondly it will provide an opportunity to build upon the long series of institutional experiments in group farming which Dr Sugden’s team has been leading since 2014. These group farming models which entail the pooling of land, labour and capital, can potentially overcome the scale and labour management constraints which impedes agricultural innovation in regions such as the Gangetic Plains which experience high levels of land fragmentation and inequality. Thus it is hoped that the combination of institutional and technical innovation will provide a blueprint for potential smallholder agricultural transformation in the two States.
Senior Lecturer in Human Geography
Staff profile for Dr Fraser Sugden, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham.
