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| ISSUE NO. 678 |
| This week's newsletter is part of an ongoing series by Sanket Jain on indigenous crops being cultivated by last-generation farmers in India. You can read Jain's essays on finger millet, maize, indigenous sorghum, ancient wheat, traditional black gram, and groundnut (peanut) in our archive. 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. THIRTY YEARS AGO . . .
Every few weeks, he kept experimenting by eating flatbread made from wheat, sorghum, and different types of millet. After a year of observations, 47-year-old Magdum reached a conclusion. “Bajri (pearl millet) gave me the maximum energy,” he says. This was in mid-1994; since then, he has never stopped eating and cultivating it.
Magdum says that his family has been planting the traditional pearl millet for over 50 years. Today, they are among the handful of farmers in Yadrav village of India’s Maharashtra state who have preserved the crop.
Gluten-free, pearl millet is a powerhouse of energy as it contains more proteins, dietary fiber, iron, zinc, and other important nutrients. It’s often labeled as a Nutri cereal because of this. Research has found that it has higher energy than rice, wheat, maize, and even sorghum. Moreover, pearl millet is the only grain that retains its alkaline properties despite cooking, making it a go-to crop for people with gluten allergy.
It is predominantly suitable for arid and drier regions with poor soil fertility and much less water supply. However, with the rapid climatic changes, several dry areas of India are reporting extreme weather events, leading to a massive loss of crops.
To increase the yield, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research has identified and released 167 hybrids and 61 varieties in many parts of India across the years. Today, hybrid varieties comprise 70 percent of India’s pearl millet production, which has led to a massive 124 percent increase in productivity since the late 1980s.
During 2013-14, India produced 9.25 million tonnes of pearl millet, which increased to 10.86 million tonnes by 2020-21. However, farmers like Magdum, although rare, never adopted the hybrid varieties. Owner of 1.2 acres of land, he reserves half an acre for cultivating indigeneous pearl millet.
He says one can manage a production of almost 600 kilograms of pearl millet in an acre of land, whereas it can be as high as 800-900 kgs with the hybrid varieties, making them lucrative.
To explain why Magdum has stuck to the traditional variety, he gives an example from 2022, a year of deadly heat waves. “Many farmers in the region who cultivated hybrid groundnut and sorghum reported a tremendous loss because of the heat waves,” he shares.
However, his traditional pearl millet survived and gave him good returns. “Nothing happens to the crop in any weather,” says Magdum.
Also, he says that the traditional varieties taste better than the hybrid ones. “I don’t have to spend any money cultivating the traditional variety as they are climate and pest-resilient,” he shares. This has helped him completely abandon toxic, costlier chemical pesticides and insecticides, significantly reducing production costs. “Even the seeds are so resilient - nothing happens to them for two years,” he says.
Predominantly, pearl millet is used to make flatbread and porridge, but it can also be used for multigrain cookies, and as nutritious fodder. Magdum finds this important because he owns two buffaloes: “Even if I just get fodder out of it, that’s enough,” he says.
Speaking on why farmers in his region abandoned the crop, Magdum says that almost everyone moved to commercial crops like sugarcane and soybean. “As farmers started abandoning their cattle, they even stopped cultivating the pearl millet because many people don’t eat it anymore,” says Magdum.
Moreover, surviving on pearl millet isn’t feasible as it just fetches 40 rupees (0.48 USD) per kilogram. Hence, Magdum cultivates it in the sugarcane fields to make ends meet. “By the time sugarcane stems grow, bajri can be harvested easily,” he explains.
Whenever Magdum looks at the rapid decline in the cultivation of traditional varieties of crops, he thinks of what his grandparents said. “Our ancestors used to say that a farmer should always have bajri and udid (black gram) at home,” he recollects. Magdum never fully understood what they meant it, until he saw indigenous varieties rapidly declining, and can now speak to the importance of preserving them in his own words, echoing his ancestors.
Yours in food, justice, and food justice, |
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