Celebrating Achievement and Progress on Natural Farming in India

This event brought together grassroots organisations from across India (East, Northeast, West, Central, North, South) to showcase their remarkable work as well as celebrate the grit and efforts of women and men champion farmers, CRPs and leaders, along with a lot of fun, music and celebrations.Key Highlights from the gathering :

• The consultative, celebratory and co-owned nature of the event opened up many perspectives and possibilities for future collaborations and knowledge sharing.
• There is a need now for the grassroots organisations to scale up the work through collaborations; NCPRI and RCRC as successful networks offer tremendous inspiration.
• It was highlighted that there is increasing interest among various state Govts on taking the NF work forward and this opportunity should be leveraged by engaging with state Govts, Tribal and Agriculture Departments as well as NRLM, SRLMs and Gram Panchayats etc.
• To influence policies, we need to produce stronger evidence, proof of concepts and effective arguments for Natural Farming. It was emphasized that grassroots organisations need to take a research-oriented approach in their work and carry out better documentation and management of knowledge and information.
• Some of the key points that came across all the regional meetings were :
  • Enhanced networking, collaborations, knowledge and experience sharing amongst the various organisations and regions
  • Organising and developing desi seed systems across regions
  • Need for capacity building and training programmes on NF
  • Enhancing documentation skills and processes