This week's newsletter is the first in an ongoing series on indigenous crops being cultivated by last-generation farmers in India, by Sanket Jain.
Jain is an independent journalist and documentary photographer based in Kolhapur, India. He is a Senior People's Archive of Rural India fellow, where he's documenting vanishing livelihoods and dying art forms from India's remote villages, and is also the co-founder of Insight Walk, a nonprofit that offers teaching fellowships to rural community women. These women work to ensure every child in their village has access to contextual education of their choice - at Insight Walk, every student designs their own syllabus.
Follow Jain's work on instagram @snkt_jain.
FOR OVER FIVE DECADES . . .
farmer Chandrakant Kamble, 62, has been making an interesting observation. “Whenever I visit any village, I look at the types of flatbread,” he says. Over the years, the indigeneous Nachni (finger millet) flatbread has almost gone extinct around his village, Kerle, in the Kolhapur district of Western India’s Maharashtra state. In his words lies a story of an almost lost crop.
Native to the highlands of Eastern Africa, finger millet originated roughly 5,000 years ago and was introduced 3,000 years ago in India. Kamble, who has been farming since childhood, says that Nachni survives severe drought, can be adapted to higher elevations, and even be cultivated across the year on any soil, making it highly versatile. For him, Nachni marks a legacy of continuing the family tradition of preserving indigenous crops. “Nachni is the source of our strength,” he says. “If we stop eating it, we won’t be able to farm.”
Compared to other millets, it’s an extremely rich source of minerals and proteins with the highest amounts of calcium. Moreover, it is a powerful iron source, helping anemia patients for centuries.
Kamble’s village has seen recurring floods destroying most crops. Talking of the rapid changes in the local climatic pattern, he says, “Now, it rains for five months a year as against three. The entire climate cycle has changed.”
For instance, a week’s rainfall in October 2022 devastated 2.7 million hectares of farmland in 30 districts of Maharashtra. Heatwaves followed, and the combined fluctuations in climatic patterns led to tremendous losses, but Kamble says he was lucky enough. He and his wife, Sangeeta, have been cultivating the traditional finger millet for over four decades. Today, they remain the handful of farmers in the village, preserving the indigenous variety.
After India’s proposal, the United Nations declared 2023 as the International Year of Millets, drawing global attention to these climate-resilient crops, which are swiftly declining.
Nachni’s climate-resilient properties, resistance to pest attacks, and five-year shelf life of seeds make it a perfect crop to face climate disasters. Moreover, for decades it helped strengthen the nutritional capacity of poor people. However, as traditional varieties began to fade, the number of
people with calcium deficiencies rose. Globally, 3.5 billion people are at risk of calcium deficiency, and over 90 percent are from Africa and Asia.
Kamble, who owns eight acres of land, observes that over the years farmers have moved towards commercial crops like sugarcane, grapes, cotton, and hybrid finger millet varieties with a higher yield. “The traditional variety takes around 100 days to grow, while the hybrid one takes less than 80 days,” he says. “Its taste is still no match to the traditional one,” says Sangeeta.
Her son, Vishal, 37, explains, “The farming pattern has changed completely. Now, we can’t farm without using chemical fertilizers and pesticides.”
India remains a leading producer of finger millet producing 1.67 million metric tonnes in 2021-22. However, Sangeeta says she is seeing a rapid decline in the number of farmers cultivating the traditional Nachni. The reasons include slower harvest and lesser prices. “Many times, we can’t
even recover the cost of production,” she says. Last November, she harvested 200 kilograms of Nachni in half-acre land, while the hybrid would have fetched her at least 350 kilograms.
The Kambles eventually started cultivating sugarcane and hybrid rice varieties to make ends meet. But they never stopped cultivating the traditional finger millet, thanks to Sangeeta's recognition of its nutritional and climate-resilient properties. "We were able to preserve this crop only because of her consistent efforts,” Chandrakant says, before adding, “You’ve to love a crop to preserve it.”
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We are thrilled and grateful to have collaborated with Jain through our Share Your Voice initiative, an ongoing effort inspired by the #sharethemicnow movement.
Yours in food, justice, and food justice,
Tay + Dor
photo by Sanket Jain
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