Section VI - Subhash Sharma of Yavatmal, 600 tonnes of Vegetables / year in the hotbed of farmer suicides

The Ray of Hope in an atmosphere of Suicides. Optimisation and Economics amidst the crisis

Datye had been quoting to us very often the Model of Subhash Sharma for Vegetables and Pulses. We had been wanting to go there for sometime but was not happening because of my mother's ill health. Finally myself, Vatsala and Vamsi visited Subhash Sharma's plot (s) in Feb 2006 to understand what exactly happens in his plot(s).

The Visit report in detail would be put up in this section later. But a broader understanding of his model is given in this section for all of us to understand the same. Subhash Sharma learnt the Natural Farming methods from Dabholkar and is also a contemporary of Subhash Palekar in this. With no external inputs and all the inputs prepared, generated, grown, cultivated within the plot, it is a very good model.

The Model:

i) He has two 30 Acre farms. But the calculations shown are for a single farm
ii) 250 Days of assured work agreement per worker = 250 X Rs.60 = Rs. 15000 / year
iii) 2 workers / acre and hence it is Rs. 15000 x 2 = Rs.30,000 / acre labour payment
iv) Output = 20T of vegetables / acre / year
He makes an agreement based on estimate of the production cost, yield and minimum sale price. Any additional income and corresponding profits are shared on an agreed basis between the farmer and the worker (presumably on 50%-50% basis). A summary of the estimate is presented below.

Refer the chart for an understanding of the Economics of his farming

The average wage per worker per day works out to Rs. 56.2 / day this is almost the same as the EGA wage.

It so happened that when he was producing this sort of an output in his first farm some of the people in the neighbourhood questioned him about the replicability of the output, so as a challenge he took up another 30 acre plot about 3 years back and matched the output of his earlier farm. Unfortunately we still dont have anyone else who has relpicated his success story as it is absolute optimisation technique. On an average daily about 3 tonnes of Vegetables leave for the market every day from both of his farms

One more remarkable thing about his farming is that there is not even a single rupee of external funding and he runs it like a proper enterprise. In fact since Vidharba is known for growing cotton and the resultant crisis he tried growing cotton in a small piece of his land and achieved great success.

For more details pls. revisit this section once again.