16 November,2024 10:55 AM IST | Mumbai | Junisha Dama
File pic
In high-octane New York, Anjali Rudraraju worked at a desk in wealth management from nine to five, and loved it. She would take the subway to work and then home, spend her annual two-week paid vacation in India, and do it all over again. But in 2010, the switch flipped and Rudraraju - then aged 30 - booked a one-way ticket home to Hyderabad. Life as a New Yorker in Finance felt meaningless.
Something had to change. And, the seed was sown in farmers' markets in the Big Apple. Rudraraju was enamoured by the fresh produce and products found there.
Upon her return to the homeland, she began travelling and studying organic farming through visits to farms and researched biodynamic farming. It's how she met her partner, Kabir Cariappa, who had grown up on a farm. The two set up Yarroway Farm in Coorg where they grow robusta coffee, pepper, coconut, mangoes, jackfruit, millets, turmeric, neem, among other produce.
Rudraraju is not the first of her kind to make the migration from urban to rural and leave a cushy job for farming. This is an increasingly common narrative among those who either have some background in farming or the financial resources to buy a piece of land.
The All India Rural Financial Inclusion Survey for 2021-22, published in October found that 57 per cent of rural households in the country - including households in semi-urban centres with a population of less than 50,000 - were agricultural. This is significantly higher than the 48 per cent reported in the previous survey of 2016-17.
Previously, it has widely been reported that the COVID-19 pandemic caused millions to go back to agriculture. This was after The India Employment Report 2024 found that the share of agricultural employment was at 190.7 million in 2019 and spiked to 221.5 million in 2020, showing an increase by 30.8 million due to the pandemic and has continued to see a steady increase. The report also found that nearly 56 million people joined agriculture between 2020-2022.
Rudraraju feels the trend seems to be continuing primarily because of "the overall quality of life, food, and exercise - they want a quieter and healthier life". She adds that access to good air and water, and a more affordable life is attracting city folks in their 30s, who are beginning to invest in land in rural pockets.
Is there financial security to match the improved work-life balance in modern farming? It's still a tough livelihood, they all say.
Farming is perhaps the only business where inputs are purchased at retail prices and the finished product is sold at a wholesale price, points out Gayatri Bhatia, who runs Vrindavan Farm in Palghar. "Farmer-consumer direct marketing networks can correct this anomaly to a great extent," says Bhatia, who sells directly to consumers.
"The other elephant in the room, which nobody seems to realise or act on, is the glaring disparity between prices of agricultural commodities or farm produce versus the cost of living," she says, "Last year, farmers in my village sold their rice at R16 per kilo, and a typical small-holder family earns about Rs 30,000 from the sale of rice. A single medical event in the family consumes this entire chunk of money, leaving little to nothing for savings."
For Bhatia, the seeds of agriculture were sown during family holidays, visiting her family's farm lands. After quitting a consulting job with the US Environmental Protection Agency, she moved back to India in 2009 to run her family farm in Palghar.
With a formal background in environmental analyses instead of agriculture, Bhatia became a grower who was environmentally beneficial. Yield from her farm includes rice, dal, oils, mangoes, leafy greens, and seasonal produce.
Most new-age farmers would probably advise people to not make the switch if money is their motivator. "What has happened in urban areas is that, especially with the IT sector, people have earned and saved enough to experiment with farming," says Shailesh Awate, whose life followed a similar trajectory from urban life to rural agriculture when he co-founded OOO Farms in Jashvantpur, Gujarat.
"So, eco-villages are coming up and scores of urban people are doing organic farming. They believe that they are going to earn money out of farming. But the fact is, globally, no growers are actually earning money," explains the farmer who grows a variety of indigenous rice, moong, millets, among other wild foods.
Farming may not bring in the big bucks yet, but the lure of a simpler life is pulling the youth who grew up on farms away from their city jobs and back to agriculture.
"Many young people left the village for jobs in the city. But they have a hard time competing because their language and communication skills are not at par," says Rudraraju, "They may not earn enough money and live in cramped spaces, which starts getting to them. I see some of them returning and saying, âI'm making Rs 10,000 less [from farming], but I'm also spending R10,000 less. At least I can live in my village'. But these are few and far in between."
This story stands true for Manjunath Gowda, who comes from a family of farmers, and now splits his time between the family farm in Kolar, Karnataka and his job as a software engineer in Bengaluru. His father once had four to five acres of land, but worked hard and expanded the farm to 100 acres. "I have been juggling agriculture and my job for the past eight to nine years. My plan is to retire from software as soon as possible and dive fully into agriculture," says Gowda, adding, "The kind of life I want to lead is very different. Sure, when the salary from software engineering comes in at the end of the month, it feels great. But it's a stressful life compared to farming. I feel good when I am doing things at our farm."
The 32-year-old works on a hybrid model at his day job in Kolar, which gives him the freedom he needs to work on the farm. He has launched Farmers' Fresh Food, an online store for organic produce, along with another venture, Samriddhi Farms, which delivers free-range country chicken and eggs.
"In today's time, every farmer needs to be a small entrepreneur who can sell his own product. What he grows at his farm, he needs to deliver directly to the customer. Then he can be a successful farmer," says Gowda. The farmer-IT professional adds that with high labour costs, it's tough to make a profit if farmers lose their margin to wholesalers. "But if you sell directly to customers, and they like your product and recommend you to others, your business keeps growing," he adds.
According to the rural inclusions survey, commissioned by the National Bank for Agriculture & Rural Development, the all-India average monthly income of agricultural households in 2021-22 was Rs 13,661. This was higher than the R11,438 in non-agricultural rural households. Meanwhile the Periodic Labour Force Survey shows that the average income of a salaried person in urban India was at R20,030 in the second quarter of fiscal 2022 and increased to Rs 21,647 in the first quarter of fiscal 2023.
But is this the ground reality? "We have not found this to be the case at all anywhere," says Awate, "If it [an increased income] is the case, why are there still suicides? They're just growing day by day."
So what does the next generation of Indian agriculture look like? "People who have ancestral land or can afford to lease out larger areas for farming will continue to do so. But those with very small areas like half acre or one acre, it's very doubtful that they will make money farming," says Gowda.
Bhatia predicts that all sorts of approaches in farming will manifest, including fast farming with more chemical use sold under the guise of productivity, high-tech farming such as hydroponics, and the use of artificial intelligence. "On the other hand, there will also be a growing community of slow farmers. Farmers that resonate with nurturing a holistic ecosystem, who learn to live harmoniously within the rhythms of nature and community," she adds.
Awate adds that India has the potential to become a nutrition hub. "Chemical corporations have destroyed all the soil across the globe. Luckily, poor countries like ours have been saved - our soil is not as depleted. The reason is our farmers do not have money to buy that urea. We have a great genetic pool [of native seeds] even though it has shrunk down to seven to eight per cent. Who is going to grow in the end? A country with great labour force, soil and genetic pool."
