Organic Farming in India: Challenges and Opportunities

Last year I had the opportunity to travel to India to speak with NGOs, farmers, and local experts about organic farming. It was an amazing, humbling, and delicious experience.

Learning about vermicompost and relay cropping practices. One promising path to economically viable organic farming is through animal husbandry. Animal products such as dung, urine, and milk can be used to make inputs at no additional cost.

From my interviews and lots of background research, I built a model that represents an individual wheat farmer’s transition from conventional to organic farming. The paper that describes this work was recently accepted to the 2016 System Dynamics conference. I have included the paper abstract and a link to the full paper below.

Farmer focus group. It was fascinating to hear how social pressures influence farming decisions. The first farmer in the village to adopt organic practices was laughed at by his peers, while simultaneously those same neighbors began paying a premium for his organic produce.

ABSTRACT: Agriculture, and hence choices made by a farmer, has a significant impact on environmental sustainability. Presently, more than 98% of farmers in India follow conventional farming using chemical fertilizers, often to the detriment of the environment, yields, and personal health. They remain hesitant to adopt organic farming despite its promise of greater sustainability and profitability. Allegedly, their reluctance stems from the debilitating consequences of a “worse-before-better” (WBB) scenario, where agricultural yields — and therefore income — decline temporarily during the transition from conventional to organic farming. Already organic farmers, however, refute such a notion as a myth. In this context, our research investigates: under what conditions is the transition from conventional to organic farming most favorable to the farmer? We build a dynamic model of the transition from conventional to organic wheat farming system, derived from literature as well as interviews with wheat farmers in Haryana, India. Our analysis first reproduces the WBB dynamics. We then suggest how factors like cost of organic farming, time to revive soil health after over fertilization, and rate at which land is converted could be used to achieve the right balance of the duration of and the profits lost during the transition for a smallholder farmer.

Download the full paper here.