Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming

The present context. As a society, we are facing multiple emergencies. Farmers livelihoods are under severe stress. Young people are migrating from rural areas to urban areas, often for low paid jobs, as they do not see much future in agriculture livelihoods. On the other hand the food we are eating is not safe and it is not as nutritious as it used to be in the past. We have a huge crisis on the soil front as we have lost vast amounts soil organic matter and we continue to lose soil organic matter at a rapid pace. There is a severe water stress. There is very widespread loss of biodiversity. All these are going to exacerbate further on account of global warming.

Why Natural farming ? It is in response to these multiple crises that the Govt of Andhra Pradesh turned to Natural farming, as a way of solving these multiple crises. The Govt wants to enhance farmers’ net incomes by reducing their costs of cultivation, improving their yields, reducing their risks and enabling them to get remunerative prices. We believe very strongly that these can be delivered through farming in harmony with nature, and not through use of high cost synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and weedicides. Govt also believes that the nutritional integrity of the food should be enhanced and food should be free from chemical residues. Further, Govt is very concerned about the risks to Agriculture because of the loss of soil organic matter, water stress and the worsening climate change crisis. Hence, in addition to the interests of the farmers and the consumers, the Govt has adopted Natural farming as it is environment friendly. It enhances climate change resilience. It enhances soil organic matter, soil fertility, water holding capacity of soils, and enhances bio diversity (above ground and below ground).

A.P.C.N.F – primacy to farmers own practices. In 2020, the name of the programme was changed to A.P Community managed natural farming, to emphasize farmers’ ownership. Even when the programme was called A.P Zero budget natural farming programme, our farmers were following a mix of Z.B.N.F practices and other biological and non-chemical inputs : farm yard manure, vermi compost, NADEP compost, dung from buffaloes, using inoculants like VAM, PSB, etc. We respect farmers’ choices in the matter of practices. We regard all of them as NF farmers, as long as they are not using synthetic chemical fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, weedicides. In addition, we have 34 N.G.O partners and they have their own variations. We have adopted all these variations. The change in name from APZBNF to A.P Community managed natural farming (A.P.C.N.F) is to give explicit recognition to the fact that the programme is farmer centric, follows farmer to farmer extension system and is driven by their innovations.