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| News Detail |
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| FAO honours model farmer from India |
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 India, 16 Oct 2009 -- Bangkok - Today, Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn presented FAO awards to five Asian farmers from Fiji, India, Indonesia, Mongolia and Thailand.
Jayanti Pradhan
A model farmer and agro-processor from India
If you mention the words “India” and “farmer”, for many people the words “poor and uneducated” will also come to mind. Those people have never met Ms. Jayanti Pradhan.
Education has always been highly valued in Ms. Jayanti’s family. Her father Gopal, also a farmer, actually studied economics at a local university but was unable to finish when her mother died. He was determined that his daughter, Jayanti, have a chance to learn. “He had a dream for me, that I should become something,’’ she says. “And he taught me that I should care about society.’’ She excelled in her studies, obtaining undergraduate and graduate degrees in botany, which she chose because she says she loves plants.
Botany may not seem as glamorous a field to India’s young when compared with the high-tech industries that have spawned great fortunes for a few. But, in an era when food shortages are increasing and climate change is threatening fertile regions, India’s future will ultimately hinge on its ability to provide food security for its population of more than a billion.
To meet that challenge, India and its farmers will not only have to work harder, they will have to work smarter. That’s where people such as Jayanti Pradhan are providing hope for all.
Armed with her knowledge, Ms. Jayanti was determined to see her family’s farming business grow. But like many farming families, they could not afford more land, and so she experimented with breeding mushrooms, which require little space and are a strong source of protein and other nutrients. She developed four varieties of mushrooms that can withstand the dry climate of Orissa state where she lives. Then she spread her knowledge and her seedlings to her neighbors, and now mushroom farming has become their main source of income. “Mushrooms are landless cultivation and a health food. This is a good way to help the poor,’’ she says.
Jayanti dubbed her new mushroom venture Gopal Biotech Agro Farms, after her father, and is now setting up a lab to breed seedlings to sell to other farmers across India.
Her farm has also expanded to breed goats and honeybees, as well as developing organic fertilizer from goat waste and the earth worms that populate her mushroom farm, and which she distributes free to poor farmers.
Technological know-how comes easy for Jayanti. “The biggest challenge in what I do is social, the fact that I am a woman,’’ she says, once again recalling her father who broke with tradition and sent his daughter to university.
Following his desires, she has done her best to help society, helping to establish 120 self-help groups for women and teaching them what she knows about mushroom farming, bee keeping and whatever else they need to raise their income and stand on their own.
“Most of all I’m proud to help the poor,’’ she says. And Ms. Jayanti is a woman about whom her father, and all of India, can certainly be proud.
More information at:
http://www.fao.org/getinvolved/worldfoodday/en/
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