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September 28, 2007

The case of the organic onions

How does Navdanya convince farmers to go organic? Organic usually comes up as the natural solution to farmer problems. Farmers in a particular region in Uttarakhand were having problems in storing their onion. The onions would go bad very soon. Negiji from Navdanya was talking to the farmers about this and he told them the onions would stay longer if they were grown organically. A few farmers were willing to try this out and found the onions had a longer shelf life. This kind of proof of principle helped others to adopt organic methods too. The Navdanya farm attempts to do exactly this – to show farmers that crops grow and grow great without the NPK inputs they have been made to believe are essential.

2 comments:

Hitchcock said...

I was reading about the "Green Revolution" that they want to start in Africa. Expensive seeds,few of them available, etc etc.
And, they said India's Green Revolution was an overwhelming success. Two sides of the coin??

Ani said...

India's green revolution is touted a great success since it led to an increase in the yield of rice and wheat. But at what cost? People used to eat a healthy variety of grains, lentils. Everything has been simplified to polished rice and wheat. The former has lost most of its nutrients. So our health is jeopardized as well as the health of the soil, that has been repeatedly subject to the same crops with chemical inputs.