Visit to Magadi on 9 July

The Saturday before I left India I had the opportunity to visit Magadi, a peri-urban town located about 45 kilometers outside of Bangalore.  Magadi is home to one of the Resource Centre on Urban Agriculture and Food Security’s (RUAF) projects which I wrote about in a blog post a few weeks ago.  It was great to go see it in person and I learned a lot more about the program.

RUAF has projects around the world (Latin America, Asia, and Africa).  A few years ago they started the From Seed to Table project at a number of sites including in Magadi.  This program was created to strengthen the marketing capacity of farmers.  In Magadi, an association of farmers was started in order to better market their products and thus improve livelihoods.  There is also a special savings group specifically for women.  In addition to better marketing, the association members learn organic farming techniques and have achieved a unity among the agricultural community that did not exist before the association.   

These farmers grow a variety of vegetables but their star vegetable is the carrot.  It was chosen because it can get a high selling price in the Magadi and Bangalore markets where the farmers’ produce is sold.

Value Chain Map for Magadi's carrot.  (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Some of the farmers in Magadi.  Can you pick out the academic?

Project director, a few female farmers, Laura Valencia (my Wooster friend), and me.

We got to talk to about 15 total farmers (out of the current 157) who are members of the producer association.  All of these farmers are within a 2 kilometer radius of the project office where the group meets once a month.  In addition to trainings, the association gives the chance for farmers to discuss issues or ideas to improve their businesses.  A few of the recent/upcoming initiatives by the association are growing carrots year-round, starting up a nursery, and reintroducing traditional seed varieties into the fields.

In addition to talking with farmers and the association’s facilitator we briefly got to visit one of the fields.  Here we saw an example of a vermiculture system (I of course dug for worms) and we got to view some women weeding a field of radishes (I of course jumped right in on this activity until realizing that no one else was following me).

I was surprised at how successfully this project seemed to be going.  Even though I loved working at Green Corps in Cleveland last summer there were still many, many challenges that the organization was facing.  I did not see nearly as many challenges in Magadi.  Of course, the contexts of the two projects are entirely different.  But I still wonder if there’s something that Cleveland's Green Corps could learn from Magadi?  This question or something similar is something I will probably be exploring in my senior thesis.

Working on our Hiroshi Takeo faces even in semi-rural India.