Western Producer reporter Mary MacArthur continues her travels across India, exploring the land many say could become the next big market for Canadian farmers.
JABALPUR, INDIA
It’s not lack of new varieties or lack of money for seed and fertilizer that plagues Indian farmers.
It’s a labour shortage.
It may be surprising that a country of more than one billion people has a labour shortage, but every day families are moving from rural villages to the cities in hopes of a better life. Few young people want to tie their lives to the backbreaking work of Indian farms.
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Thousands of acres of rice and grain are still harvested and seeded by a hoe and hand or bullock and a simple disc. Workers harvest with a sickle, plants are tied into bundles and the seed is thrashed by bashing the grain on a webbed table.
The shortage of workers willing to spend their days in the field seeding and harvesting has many farmers selling their bullocks and renting or buying tractors.
Ranjit Singh of Gazipur, Viharsi, is one of them.
Singh and his family used to take two to three months to cultivate and seed their 48 acre farm with two bullocks. It now takes 10 days to do the same work with a tractor.
“Now it’s an easier job,” said Singh, whose family farm was larger before it was divided between himself and his uncles.
“The tractor doesn’t need to be fed every day.”
Singh pays his workers $2 to $5 a day, plus meals, depending on the crop. He allows his permanent staff to grow their own vegetables and crops on one acre of his farm.
It may not seem like much by North American standards, but Singh said labour costs quickly add up.
“Labour is very expensive.”
Sugar cane is the most difficult crop to harvest. The crop is prickly and harvest is labour intensive. Few people are willing to take on the job.
“It’s very hard work and hard to find labourers.”
Singh has also eliminated the difficult job of harvesting rice by hand and rents a rice harvester.
Workers are no easier to find on the tiny one-acre farms that cover the countryside like a patchwork quilt.
Shyamji, a farmer just outside Varanasi, said he must pay $2 a day, plus food, to get the help he needs on his mostly vegetable farm.
The farm is located close to the bustling city, where young people have migrated to find a better life, he said through a translator.
Instead, Shyamji and other farmers in the area now rent equipment to cultivate the land after harvest.
In the village of Bicholim in southwestern India, agricultural officials toured farms at the end of November after unseasonable rain ruined up to 80 percent of the rice paddies, coconut fields and nut and banana crops.
Farmers who used mechanization suffered less than those who depend on the traditional method because they were able to harvest their crops before the rain.
S.K. Rao, dean of agriculture at Jawaharial Nehru Krishi Vishwavidyalaya Agricultural University in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, said all farmers are looking to mechanize.
Farmers are forming co-ops to find ways to rent equipment, he added.
“Small holding farmers don’t want to keep bullocks as well. Everyone is interested in mechanization.”
Wheat breeder R.S. Shula said mechanization is the only way farmers can stay on their land.
“Only the farmers that are resourceful and have the necessary mechanization will survive,” he said.
