Thread by @Vidyut

Many people give gyan on how small and marginal farmers should move to other professions. How?

Their skills are related to agriculture. From my very marginal tangle around the legalities of doing business around growing plants, here is a rant.

Farmers should reduce input costs, adopt modern practices. This is a good one.

Agricultural research worldwide focuses on making modern tech accessible and doable in rural, low income areas. There have been experiments doing tissue culture using fertilizer, sugar and bleach!

This was done, so that farmers in rural areas could TC their own seed potatoes (for example) locally. Good results too.

So say.... a farmer says no profit in agriculture, let me make seed potato tissue cultures for other farmers to buy from me.

Legally? Can't.

He can't register a TC lab without buying lab grade equipment, even if he is using technology that is designed to make TC cheaper.

So he continues farming. Not affordable.

Thinks that he can make a better income from growing more exotic crops. All these city people are into exotic decorative plants to put into their homes. I'll go to the city and grow those expensive plants and make money.

Ends up selling 10Rs tulsi, because...

Govt documents don't even seem to recognize that people may want to grow anything that doesn't land up in wholesale markets.

Legal mess to figure out import of seed/parent stock. City plots too small to legally register as nursery...

Like with the online sellers. ONLY way you can use a hell of a lot of lucrative things that need govt permits (schemes, import/export,...) is you go big. Some fellow made a list of best practices. You have to check all the boxes. How can small farmers do that?

So, you have a lot of highly, highly skilled farmers, growing crops on a shoestring and own lives and blood that get patronizing advice about "zero input farming" and road blocks if they want to actually do business using their valuable skills for more sophisticated business.

Some babu who has never managed to keep a plant alive will write rules on how nurseries should be managed, what provisions they must have..... blah blah.

A real grower knows that if a nursery can produce live plants for sale, it is providing all tha the plant needs.

But that grower will not legally be able to extend beyond whatever local attempts without legal recognition. Even to get appropriate loans, permits to stock plants...

He'll end up hanging from a tree or selling land and working as a labourer on some cosntruction site. Oh wait.

Not that construction business is hiring these days either.

In a country that is rapidly losing green cover, sustainability of agriculture as an occupation, has vast numbers of people who can keep plants alive as easy as breathing, we ruin their lives, because... so many rules.

You can make a TC of potato in your bedroom. what do you need a mass spectrometer for?

TEST the bloody seeds for quality instead of micromanaging how they are produced! You can have a state of the art TC lab and contaminated cultures also. Or use the wrong damn seed to multiply.

How does the size of the nursery matter? Why is it not legal to grow plants for sale on say.... a narrow strip of land near a road that can't realistically be measured in hectares? The size of the plants sold is in inches!

But like with the street vendors and online sellers, govt doesn't care about the small guys. Its guidelines are based on what they want from the fellows exporting wholesale items by the ton.

They don't care that lack of recognition of smaller scale deprives the small guys.

For those saying size matters because you can't do productive farming in small space.... of course you can. Vegetable starts, for example. You germinate seeds, and sell seedlings for people to grow in pots/vegetable plots, etc. Doesn't take a lot of space.

A person growing rare plants in a 10 x 10 space can make a good income exporting them. Except - govt won't recognize his "nursery" if he can't talk "hectares of land" "survey number" and "lakhs of plants". Bigger joke is to list varieties grown. Designed for "2 acres of basmati"

A rare plants grower may have a few plants each of hundreds of species and they will keep getting traded, numbers changing.

Heck I'll get a headache trying to list my stock plants from one balcony! Many collectors won't list rare and expensive plants publicly for fear of theft.

What does the govt care whether I have 3 of nepenthes reinwardtiana and 50 seedlings of nepenthes ampullaria? It doesn't. But the system is designed to recognize only the big ones with vast tracts of land growing one thing.

Most farmhouses even not like that.

There will be a vegetable garden, some aloevera, maybe a few coconut trees, some fruit trees.... how the heck does a person list everything?

But if they legally want to grow and sell plants - instead of just crops - that is what the govt wants. List each plant they can sell.

A person may not earn a lot from say a few trees of each kind, but an experienced grower and breeder can breed plants that will sell for pretty good cost.

Could be a very lucrative way to move out of agriculture if it were easy in India.

Therefore, when you share all that internet gyan on what farmers "should" do, just STFU, because you have no freaking idea just how few choices they are actually given to do profitable business.

And this is not just limited to farmers. Told the builder of that flat my parents invested in, to use the garden for urban farming instead of useless ornamentals. He said he didn't want any complications (law, other buyers, etc) by promoting agriculture in residential land.

So, it isn't that farmers are too stupid to keep doing something that screws them over. It is that there is so much lack of clarity and system support for stepping even a toe outside the line, that anyone thinking of it is automatically discouraged.

A landless farmer will HAVE TO rent land to earn from growing, because very limited places/support if he simply did some other growing that he could do in small spaces. Then the profit must cover the rent (often in kind).

Govt ka kya jaata hai if he uses the roof of his hut to legally make and sell seedling starts or grow slow growing rare and expensive plants that could sell later for a profit? Nothing. Heck they encourage urban farming. But as a hobby. Good luck trying to earn from it.

To be clear, nothing is stopping anyone from growing anything anywhere they want. Problem is if you have to take a loan to expand, export or use some systematic method for selling. Without land, you can't prove you are a farmer or a nursery. Even if what you grow doesn't need.

On another level, also no room for innovation, experimentation. Talk hectares or go figure out how to get your permits.

Thought I'd tweet about this, because we are so used to talking about agriculture as CROPS. without realizing that that is pretty much all a farmer can do without getting incomprehensibly tangled in paper.

And the Mari Antoinettes of agricultural economics be like "so let them do something else"

Giving another hypothetical example.

Someone goes IDEA!!! Let me help move some farmers out of unprofitable farming with an urban gardening venture. We can use all those unused terrace spaces and balconies and whatever to grow stuff. Win win. Combat pollution, fresh greens...

The best you would be able to do would be provide gardening services. Your farmers would become low paid malis. They wouldn't be able to rent those spaces as a business to profit from crops, because hectares? Survey numbers? List what all you are planning to grow and sell?

At best, they would be able to convince societies, home owners etc to do urban gardening and that they could manage it for them for a fee. 2 months later, people get bored, think they can water their plants themselves. Or heck, was a good passing fad, no time now.

That wouldn't fit your goal of creating a sustainable income for farmers. It isn't exactly like domestic work - results of growing can take months, years to be visible.

While country remains hostile to micro, forget being able to do have diverse intellectual capital, innovation, etc - in addition to forgetting about rising unemployment.

Hobbyist geeks are the edge of micro innovation. Hobbies get expensive and unsustainable if you can't earn.

What is the point of having a passion for something and spending loads on it to come up with something really useful and innovative if you aren't allowed to sell it to fund further innovation unless you get into big business?