"With our cities in tatters,
builders have now started
attacking our interior
villages. We want people to
get back to farming, and show
them that it's a profitable
endeavour."
POST AUTHOR: RINCHEN NORBU WANGCHUK
POST PUBLISHED: AUGUST 1, 2020
POST CATEGORY: FARMING GOA
Nestor Rangel, a 52-year-old agriculturist, and his team,
have helped 500 families in his native village of St Estevam
to convert fallow and unused land into productive organic
paddy fields.
Like most villages in Goa, the picturesque village
on the river Mandovi was once a prime target for
real estate developers looking at parcels of arable
land lying fallow, to build concrete commercial and
residential establishments. The village was even
earmarked by developers for a coal transportation
carriageway.
Nestor's successful model of community farming, which began
in earnest during the kharif season of 2018, is being seen as
a means of obstructing the rapid conversion of farmland into
concrete jungles. This has spawned similar initiatives in
different Goan villages with local communities mindful of the
need to protect their land and ecology.
Starting the Journey
An electronic engineer by trade, Nestor spent most of his
life away from St Estevam in cities like Mumbai and
subsequently Vadodara, where he was the manager of a factory
owned by a Japanese multinational corporation AIWA
manufacturing consumer electronics. In 2002, the factory
shut down with the Japanese MNC closing shop around the world.
After the company shut down, he returned to Goa to open an
electronics service centre and showroom dealing in consumer
electronic products. With service centres in Margao and
Panaji, he had about 40-odd employees working for him.
Everything changed in 2007, he decided to shut shop
and venture into farming. Just before getting out
of the electronics business, Nestor bought a
seven-acre strip of land in Thane, a village in
Goa's Sattari Taluka. Today, this "strip of land"
which extends upto 40 acres, includes a dairy, goat
farm, a mango plantation of 700+ trees and a
massive cashew orchard.
However, after Nestor began expanding his farm in 2007,
Father Bismarque Dias, an activist priest once known for
taking on the state's notorious land mafia, urged him to
bring back farming to St Estevam. "He was always after me to
start a community farm project in St. Estevam, and visited
my farm many times," he recalls.
For the past four decades, residents of the village had given
up farming to take up more lucrative work aboard ships
sailing abroad or in cities like Mumbai.
"Knowing of my involvement in agriculture, he
wanted me to do something in St Estevam. Land all
over Goa is being bought and occupied by people
from outside the state, who are constructing
massive structures atop these pristine fields. Our
fields have been lying fallow for 30-40 years since
most locals work on ships sailing abroad or in
Mumbai. Most Goans are hardly dependent on
agriculture. However, If we don't practice
farming, the government will say that the land is
merely lying vacant, take it away and sell it to
the highest bidder. We decided to fight back by
cultivating our lands," mentions Nestor.
Khazan Farming, Paddy and the Comunidade
One way of bringing back agriculture to this picturesque
river island was to revert to tradition. Past generations of
Goans had long practiced an estuarine agriculture system
called Khazan, "a carefully designed topo-hydro-engineered
agro-aquacultural ecosystem mainly based on the regulation
salinity and tides," states a report in the Down to Earth
magazine.
"Khazans are reclaimed lands from the river or the sea. A
created network of bunds protects the agricultural fields and
adjoining villages from tidal flows," notes this description.
One crop which can grow in these saline conditions
is paddy. "It's a pretty versatile crop, which can
grow in saltish and brackish water. So, we decided
to take up paddy cultivation since we also receive
sufficient amounts of rain. This was sometime in
the 2017-18 kharif season, and for the community
project we took up 500,000 square metres," says Nestor.
Underpinning the community-level exercise led by Nestor and
his team, was a mechanical cultivation process for ploughing,
transplanting and harvesting, considering prohibitively high
labour costs and manpower shortages. Helping them in this
endeavour were Father George Quadros, a pioneer of mechanised
paddy cultivation in South Goa, the State agricultural
department and its subsidiary Agricultural Technology
Management Agency (ATMA).
"We have gone into total mechanisation working with paddy and
concentrating on the fallow lands of Goa. More specifically,
we are working with the transplanter to take away the
drudgery, high cost and non-availability of labour. Farmers
get their fields ploughed and ready, we as service providers,
bring the transplanter to their fields. The transplanter
covers one acre per hour, which is tremendous and saves the
farmer 50% on their original cost. There are not enough
service providers at the moment, but once this grows
agriculture in Goa will be more or less community based,"
says Father George, who is the project director at Don Bosco
Loutolim Society.
For the project, the community employed transplanting
machines manufactured by Kubota, a Japanese company, in which
they have to put seedlings in trays. These trays are then
loaded into the transplanter machine, which picks up the
seedlings and transfers them onto the land. It can cover
about 30,000 square metres in about 8 hours with just two
persons operating it and thus cuts down on labour costs. No
chemical fertilizers or pesticides were used in the process,
and for harvesting they employed a harvester machine.
PHOTO: The St Estevam Community Project (Image courtesy Facebook)
"To purchase this equipment, we needed subsidies
from the government. The only time we used labour
was for de-weeding, an important part of the
process since weeds end up taking up nutrition
meant for your rice. Most people use chemicals for
de-weeding, but we decided not to because there is
a lot of biodiversity in our fields like snakes,
crocodiles, fish, etc. Instead of putting them at
risk, we decided to weed manually," says Nestor.
It's a bit on the expensive side, but the community was going
for an organic project. Labour for weeding came from
Sattari. After the cashew season came to end in May, women
labourers working on Nestor's farm in Thane had no
employment. He put 10 of them to work on the community farm
in St Estevam, driving them 40 km each way on his truck.
Each of these women got about Rs 30,000-35,000 after they
helped with de-weeding.
"In our first harvest, we got about 75,000 kg of
paddy. There are agencies that procure paddy from
farmers at government approved price which is about
Rs 20 per kg. Selling it at that price, farmers
lose money because their cost of cultivation works
out to around Rs 4.5-5 per square metre. Without
subsidies, it goes upto Rs 8-9 per square metre.
If we sell the paddy as is to a government agency,
we lose money. Instead, we decided to process it
and convert that paddy into rice. The rice we grow
is a nutritious brown colored variety called
Jyothi. I took this rice to a mill in Maharashtra'
Sindhudurg district, which helped us convert paddy
into rice. From the total amount of paddy, they
extracted about 60% into rice. The rice wasn't
polished to retain its nutritional value. After we
processed the rice, we packaged it and sold it all
over the state for Rs 60 per kg," informs Nestor.
"Communities in Goa have come together to farm their lands.
If communities don't come together, mechanisation doesn't
work since the use of such equipment requires big areas.
Mechanisation saves time, cost and brings efficiency to the
whole process," says Father George.
Capital Generation and the Comunidade
Capital for this entire project came from the village
residents. Historically, Goans practiced a distinct form of
community farming called the gaonkaria system which the
Portuguese colonists overhauled and rechristened into what is
known today as comunidade.
Land was collectively owned by the village and parceled out
by an administrative unit at the local community level. At a
community level they would allocate land to a family where
they could build a house or farm to sustain their family.
Each family was allocated about an acre or so by the core
administrative unit, which handled the leasing out of the
land to its residents. The land could not be leased out to
non-residents. If a woman married a man from another
village, she would lose her gaonkari (village resident)
status, and would have to register as a gaonkari in her
husband's village.
"When India reclaimed Goa from the Portuguese, they
brought in their rules and unfortunately the person
who was tilling the land now became a tenant.
Earlier, if you didn't farm on the land for
two-three years, it would go back to the community,
which would reallocate that land to somebody else.
Once community owned lands, they were now under
individual tenants. People have their names on a
land document called Form I & XIV, which marks them
out as tenants. Out to make a quick buck, many
sell off the land to the highest bidder.
Naturally, the old rule of giving the land back to
the community went away. That's one of the reasons
why farming stopped in Goa," informs Nestor.
Backed by the entire village, Nestor and his team collected
money from the people. Even his family are tenants on one
acre of comunidade land.
"As per the landholding on Form I and IV, we took Rs 3.50 per
person per square metre. If somebody has 1,000 square
metres, they would give Rs 3500. All this money was
collected under the 'Ilha Verde Farmers' Club'. There were
about four of us organising everything in the club because
most didn't engage in farming," he says.
Everyone in the village is part of the farmers'
club. Each one paid the group Rs 3.50 per square
metre as per their landholding to start the work
since they didn't have any other source of capital.
This is how they generated capital.
"After processing the paddy into brown rice, we managed to
pay back everybody and there was some additional money left
in hand (Rs 200,000-300,000 as per some estimates), which we
used for repair works of structures like the manos, which are
sluice gates that control the flow of water to and from dikes
and prevent salt water from entering. It's like a dam
system. So, we used the money to repair these sluice gates
and even construct new ones. If these sluice gates break,
the salt water from the river floods the fields making them
uncultivable because the soil becomes too saline even for
rice cultivation," he notes.
More than Farming
For the next season in 2019-20, the St Estevam
community doubled the area under cultivation to
10,00,000 square metres. Unfortunately, there was
heavy flooding that season and the village was
waterlogged for about 20 days. All the rice
rotted, and they lost about Rs 28,00,000-30,00,000
last season. Till now, they haven't been
compensated by the government.
This year, as a result of COVID-19, a lot of male residents
who work on ships abroad, came back because there was no
business on cruise lines. They had taken up 1 lakh square
metres this year just on a trial basis, and things seem to be
progressing nicely.
"The St Estevam experiment has given the entire
agricultural sector in Goa hope that mechanisation,
land pooling, community farming and social
marketing can work and make Goa's rice fields a
working reality once again," said former
agricultural officer Miguel Braganza to Scroll.in.
However, Nestor's endeavour isn't merely limited to St
Estevam. He is today consulting with other villages like
Santa Cruz and Dongri who want to emulate their model of
community farming.
Meanwhile, he also picks up paddy from other farmers engaged
in Khazan farming and facilitates the sale of 10,000 kg of
rice every month. He sells rice only from Khazan lands
because it tastes different with river minerals. Every two
months he processes 25,000 kg of paddy and takes it to Kudal,
Maharashtra, for processing.
"Maybe due to the pandemic, since other industries
have shut down, many Goans are going back to
farming. But I hope this trend continues. Our
main aim wasn't to grow rice, but to get our fields
cultivated so that builders don't eye them.
Rampant construction is resulting in hills being
cut and pristine farmland destroyed. With our
cities in tatters, builders have now started
attacking our interior villages. We want people to
get back to farming, and show them that it''s a
profitable endeavour. In my own farm, I employ
about seven people and pay them each Rs 15,000 a
month in addition to a free litre of milk everyday.
This is a project to save our fields and we are
using agriculture as a vehicle to do that,"
emphasises Nestor.
"My village doesn't depend on farming financially. This is
about protecting our lands from rampant construction. My
activism isn't protesting on the roads, but growing paddy on
the fields and taking them back from builders," he adds.
(Edited by Gayatri Mishra)
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