Today around 450 million people earn most of their income by working on their family smallholding. With their wealth of collective experience and knowledge of local conditions, they play a vital role in feeding the planet. SeedWorks is proud to associate with numerous smallholder farmers and helping them flourish by partnering in a sustainable seed supply chain. It is the commitment of SeedWorks supply chain to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and their communities and empower them by helping them improve their agricultural practices, seed production skills and income Enhancement. By 2020 we had enabled around 45000 smallholder farmers to access initiatives of our seed production
The Story of Gujarat /Rajasthan Tribal farmers:
SeedWorks does significant cotton seed production in the state of Gujarat & bordering districts of Rajasthan. The journey started in 2014 when we identified tribal communities whose average holding is as low as 0.25 acres and was used to grow local maize production with a meagre income of 7-8 k per Acre. They were transformed as sustainable cotton seed producers through continuous training & hand-holding. As seed production is a skilful activity, the initial years were challenging in getting them adopted. However, with continuous efforts and creating awareness among the communities, now our scale of operations in the tribal communities is empowering close to 9000 growers.
The Fact Sheet:
- In Gujarat, we have around 30K smallholder farmers and 9K of them are in districts like Sabarkantha, Danta, Banaskatha, Udaipur, Chota Udaipur, Panchamahal, Baroda tribal communities.
- Our production created self-employment for these tribal farmers & they have increased access to Right Agricultural Practices.
- They are getting fair prices, and favourable trade terms besides access to financial services such as credit and loans.
- SeedWorks helped Increased participation of women and youth, by enabling self-employment and creating a strong local economy to increase the standard of living
- Child labour is eliminated through economic empowerment and the children are going to schools.
