Palakkad: The paddy fields of Mankurissy village in Palakkad district on Sunday woke up to a unique celebration: a mudfest in which youngsters played football and a number of village games on the paddy field that was made ready for farming even as a number of children were initiated into planting of paddy seedlings by veteran farm labourers. And that was how Farmers Collective, a grouping of Keralite techies who have come together to try their hand at farming, wanted to launch their ambitious paddy cultivation project.
"We got very enthusiastic response from the villagers especially the youngsters who found it a unique way to get back to the paddy field," Suresh Kunhupillai, one of the promoters of the collective and the mudfest, said. "We have already planted an acre on the first day, and hope to complete the planting in another week." The Collective is cultivating 30 acres of leased land, to start with. The collective works with local farmers. "We tie up with local farmers for the paddy cultivation," Mr Kunhupillai said. "We offer them an assured return along with an incentive which depends on the harvest. The initial investment is pooled from persons interested in farming. We have got very encouraging response to the request for investors," he said.
The Collective follows organic farming methods for paddy cultivation and plans to market the products across the state. "We expect to hit the market with the rice from the paddy which we planted today in 90 to 120 days and we have already started planning for the marketing the same," Mr Kunhupillai said. The techies take to the farming experiment a time when paddy cultivation in the state is facing serious threats with the area under cultivation shrinking rapidly. While the state had close to a million hectres of paddy fields in the early seventies, it is less than two lakh hectres now.
