Farmer’s Success Story : Rajkumar in Cuddalore district.

I am N Rajkumar from the village Reddypalayam in Cuddalore district. I am aged 36 years and we are seven members in our family. We fully depend on agriculture for our livelihood. We have four acres of cultivable land and we live with the income from it.

Normally we cultivate paddy and sugarcane in our village. Though we won’t have huge profit,  we preferred this because we don’t know any alternate crop culture.  During 10th and 11th November, 2015, there was heavy rain and floods and our entire village was destroyed by the floods. And unfortunately that was our harvest season. There was flood of water and trashes everywhere and we realized that we lost everything in this flood and we are demoralized and didn’t know what to do.

During this period of despair, people from Inspire and AID visited our village. They consoled us and gave us hope and confidence that we would have a future. They assured us that they would reclaim the land so that we could cultivate soon.

Then they started work with “Boomi Pooja” and leveled the ground to the previous state. Around 361 acres of land of 245 farmers was made ready for cultivation by them. They cleaned the entire village and trained the farmers in various trades viz Mushroom, Bee hives and organic farming.

​The training was given by the field workers of Inspire and this helped the women of our village with employment. We had two days training programme on 19th and 20th of May 2016. Experienced farmers and agricultural experts participated and trained our people in Organic farming, multiple crop farming, proper marketing techniques, creating a federation for farmers and drip irrigation system. They gave seeds for enriching land for organic farming and we cultivated with them. And then we started our usual cultivation with 16 types of crops including vegetables, flowers and peanut  from June2016. And we are having a good yield also.

Moreover, we have created a federation and approximately 450 farmers have joined in it. Field workers from Inspire are coming to us and helping us with new techniques of cultivation. And we thank Inspire and AID for giving us a new life.

Yours truly,

Rajkumar

Farmer from Reddypalayam.

Cuddalore district.