Gyanlata Hemrom, a 40-year-old farmer and entrepreneur from Barkuli village in Khunti district, Jharkhand, remembers a time when she and her family lived in a rundown house, struggling to make ends meet. She often had to work on other people’s farms, while her elder brother would often leave their village to find work elsewhere.
During cropping seasons, Gyanlata also worked on her family’s modest plot of land, growing and selling whatever she could. However, they couldn’t produce enough to generate an income that they could then invest in improving their productivity, thus limiting their prospects.
In the early months of 2021, however, everything changed for Gyanlata when PRADAN (Professional Assistance for Development Action) came up with a novel idea. Since the mid-1980s, PRADAN, a renowned nonprofit, has worked in different corners of India to empower marginalised communities, especially women, by building their capacity for sustainable livelihoods.
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In Jharkhand, for the past 20 years, they have promoted organic farming as a form of sustainable livelihood. So, what did PRADAN do for Gyanlata?
They introduced her to regenerative agriculture — a holistic approach focused on restoring the local ecosystem while simultaneously boosting farmers’ income — and built upon it to open up a major business opportunity for her. A key element of regenerative agriculture is using bio-inputs (organic compost, natural pesticides, seedlings, etc), but it also involves practices that regenerate soil, conserve water, and diversify crops, among others.
To help farmers access these bio-inputs, PRADAN established the first bio-resource centre (BRC) in Khunti district in April 2021 with assistance from their donors. Gyanlata was handed the keys to the BRC, a move that ultimately transformed her life.
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“Our local women’s self-help group (SHG) learned about the BRC from PRADAN,” Gyanlata recalls, in a conversation with The Better India. “My sisters in the SHG encouraged me to take this chance. I saw it as a way to start my own business while continuing farming. I jumped at the opportunity and decided to become a BRC entrepreneur.”
Today, she practices regenerative farming on six acres (shared land of the joint family- her own share of land would be 2 acres), of which three acres are used to grow a variety of crops — marua (finger millet), urad (black gram), makka (maize), tomatoes, cabbage, chillies and capsicum, all through the year. Meanwhile, the BRC she runs today serves approximately 1,200 farmers from her village and the surrounding areas.
From Rs 60,000 to Rs 10 lakh: building a farming business with dignity
As Gyanlata notes, “At our BRC, we prepare and sell vermicompost. We also operate a nursery where we prepare beds for seedlings such as chilli, brinjal, capsicum, and cabbage. Depending on farmers’ orders, we assist them in preparing nursery beds for their seedlings. We also sell natural pest repellants like Agniastra and Neemastra, and pheromone traps, blue and yellow sticky traps, and microbial inoculants (mixed into natural compost) like Trichoderma and Pseudomonas, among other items, to our fellow farmers.”
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In addition to higher earnings from farming, Gyanlata’s BRC business has also picked up pace. As she claims, “In our first year, our BRC did business worth just Rs 60,000. This year, we have so far done business worth Rs 5 lakh, but our target for the end of the year is to finish between Rs 8 lakh and Rs 10 lakh with the Rabi season upcoming.”
What’s more, her life has undergone a profound transformation. As she explains, “I am now able to send my children to a good school away from our village. My elder brother no longer migrates outside the village looking for work, and we no longer have to work for others. Instead, we work out of our home. We used to have a bicycle, but now we have our own car. Now, instead of a house with a thatched roof that would leak, we have built two houses for the family. We are not very rich, but we live with much more dignity.”
Understanding regenerative agriculture
Speaking to The Better India, Nrusingh Sutar, Team Coordinator (Partnerships) at PRADAN, and a known face of regenerative agriculture in rural Jharkhand, notes, “There are many phrases synonymous with regenerative agriculture like natural farming, organic farming, climate-smart agriculture, zero-till agriculture, etc. Regenerative agriculture is not opposed to organic farming or natural farming, but it’s a much broader phrase. You literally have the word ‘regenerative’ in it, which means that it not only brings economic prosperity for farmers but also rejuvenates the entire local ecosystem.”
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PRADAN also belongs to the ClimateRISE Alliance, a collective driving grassroots climate solutions from millets to mangroves.
As Sutar notes, PRADAN’s approach to regenerative agriculture is based on four elements:
1. Resource Rejuvenation: The focus here is on integrating land, water, and forest resources to strengthen farming opportunities. This includes practices like in-situ rainwater harvesting, watershed management, and integrated natural resource management.
At the field level, farmers incorporate trees and livestock into their systems, like using manure from cattle and goats to produce organic fertilisers. Establishing a permanent approach like the multi-layer cropping system helps reduce soil disruption and enables year-round cropping, which maintains soil health and productivity over the long term.
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2. Increasing Farm Resilience: This involves activating soil biology to promote healthy crop growth. PRADAN encourages practices like establishing permanent raised beds with minimal soil disturbance and adopting multi-layer farming, i.e. growing multiple crops on the same land over successive years. These methods help protect the soil and improve its fertility, making farms more resilient to climate variability and pest attacks.
3. Supplying the Bio-Inputs: Since the right inputs are not available in regular shops, PRADAN mobilises resources from state-funded programmes and their own donor base to set up bio-resource centres (BRCs) where local entrepreneurs prepare organic inputs like microbial-enriched compost (“super compost”). This compost includes microbial inoculants such as NPK consortia, mycorrhiza fungi, rhizobium bacteria, Trichoderma, and Pseudomonas—all tailored to farmers’ needs to improve soil health, disease resistance, and crop yield.
Also, fertilisers like cow dung manure and vermicompost are common starting points. Once the crop is growing, farmers use foliar sprays like multi-seed extract made from fermented cereal, pulse, and oilseed grains to boost growth. To protect crops, they prepare organic bio-pesticides such as Agniastra, Neemastra, and Brahmastra, along with mechanical tools like pheromone traps and sticky traps.
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4. Involving Local Organisations: The movement towards regenerative agriculture is strengthened by including local entities such as Panchayats, women self-help groups, and collectives like farmer-producer organisations (FPOs). These groups promote awareness, facilitate training and better access to markets, and help sustain ecological practices.
Women supply bio-inputs
As Sutar explains, “All the entrepreneurs running these BRCs are women from different self-help groups (SHGs). Supporting them in running their business are family members. These entrepreneurs are largely local women who have good local networks, risk-taking ability and entrepreneurial skills. Besides receiving training on how to scientifically prepare these bio-inputs, they are also taught how to prepare a business model, bottle the products, showcase them, and maintain the registers. We also call upon established BRC entrepreneurs like Gyanlata to train prospective entrepreneurs.”
To set up these centres, PRADAN raises funds from different donors and mobilises funding from different government departments. As Sutar explains, “Building on PRADAN’s earlier experience with BRCs, we are now working toward creating a Centre of Excellence around this initiative in Jharkhand. In addition to the 60 existing BRCs, efforts are underway to nurture and strengthen an additional 50 across different regions of the state.”
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“Encouragingly, some women even invest Rs 30,000–40,000 of their own money to establish BRCs, while we extend infrastructural support through various donor-supported projects and government partnerships. The Department of Agriculture, Government of Jharkhand, is also in the process of setting up more than 150 BRCs across agri-smart villages (ASV) and natural farming clusters under the National Mission on Natural Farming (NMNF). Along with my colleagues and other experts, we are providing training to key officials and staff of the department on how to establish and sustain these centres,” he adds.
From one woman’s transformation in Barkuli to a network of women-led bio-resource centres, PRADAN’s work is showing how regenerative farming can uplift families and restore ecosystems. But this is only the beginning. In the next part of this story, we’ll look at how farmer-producer organisations, collective action, and government support are helping scale this movement across Jharkhand, bringing thousands of farmers into a more sustainable and dignified future.
Edited by Leila Badyari
