Against the Grain: Farming for the Planet in India’s Breadbasket

Though his farm is less than an acre in size, it’s woven into India’s breadbasket, a network of millions of small farms across the Northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana.

Today, after a recent planting, Singh’s field is taking in the sun, waiting to transform. But around it, smoke fills the air from multiple directions. Soon, the sun will be replaced by a pale dot, signaling bleak times ahead.

Right now, much of India’s breadbasket is on fire.

The burning question

At roughly the same time each year, 2 million farmers across Punjab and Haryana set their fields aflame.

The heat kills the microbes that once gave the soil its fertility. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide that were stored up in plants drift into the upper atmosphere, adding to the growing layer of gases heating the planet.

At the surface, toxins like carbon monoxide and ozone fill the air, making breathing difficult for rural and urban residents alike.

Why burn? For many farmers, the decision is less a decision and more a response to climate-shortened growing seasons, regulatory requirements and rapid changes in the world of farming.

Fortunately, the solutions also start with transformations in farming, and farmers like Singh are sharing what they know with anyone who’ll listen.

A tale of two scarcities

In the 1960s, India’s Green Revolution brought high-yielding seeds and machinery like tractors to Punjab and Haryana, turning the region into an agricultural powerhouse.

Charged with bolstering India’s food security, millions of farmers started doing what was once inconceivable: growing both rice and wheat on the same field in the same year.

But, over time, this new intensified farming caused groundwater levels to dip dangerously low, threatening communities and ecosystems. To save water, the government started in 2009 to require farmers to wait to flood their rice paddies until the start of the monsoon rains.

This shift helped address the water scarcity, but as a side effect, it caused a new scarcity: time. Suddenly the time between the rice harvest and wheat planting shrank to just 10-20 days.

This wouldn’t be a problem if not for the stubble.

Big trouble with stubble

Farmers are able to quickly gather the rice by driving large combine harvesting machines, but the process leaves behind a sharp and twisting heap of woody straw known as paddy stubble. In order to plant wheat, they must remove this maze of stubble—and fast.

Seeding a better future

Amandeep Kaur knows it doesn’t have to be this way. She also knows she could’ve escaped the haze and accepted an offer from a foreign university. Instead, Kaur chose college close to home so she could support her family’s farm in Punjab.

She’s made a sizeable impact on farming in her community, and her voice is only growing.

Kaur urged her father to stop burning crop residue several years ago. Now she helps lead the family’s operations across 45 acres. The father-daughter duo, willing to try something new, were early adopters of a crop seeding machine called Happy Seeder that holds a lot of promise.

As the Happy Seeder rolls behind its towing tractor, it:
        1) collects and chops the paddy stubble
        2) plants wheat seeds into the soil, and
        3) spreads the chopped rice straw over the wheat as a mulch.

Not only do seeders like this one eliminate the need to burn, they also improve the soil by trapping moisture and creating natural fertilizer.

While stubble-burning neighbors must increasingly spend more income on fertilizers to rebuild their fields, Kaur’s soil has stayed alive and is constantly regenerating and enriching itself. It’s also supporting a web of life.

“When we burn the fields, we are burning biodiversity,” says Kaur. “But even insects have family and we need to respect that.”

Farmers are the heroes

Every farmer who switches away from burning stubble represents a win for the planet. But in a region where farms average less than 10 acres, substantially reducing carbon emissions and recharging the water table will take a lot of farmers.

Switching 250,000 more farms to no-burn agriculture is The Nature Conservancy (TNC) current goal, after years of piloting with farmers across the region.

“The most distinctive feature of this work is its scale,” says Annapurna Vancheswaran, Managing Director of TNC India. TNC’s approach in India sees farmers as partners and the heroes they can be in combatting climate change, water scarcity and air pollution.

As Vancheswaran’s team helps farmers switch off of burning, it identifies the most practical and affordable methods that can be shared more broadly. Beyond providing valuable insights, farmers like Singh and Kaur infuse energy and optimism that invigorates TNC and it partners.

There is, after all, a lot of work to do; helping 250,000 farmers change how they farm requires reaching millions of people in one way or another.

And the ways are many: Farmer WhatsApp groups. Wall murals. Mobile apps. Thousands of agri-entrepreneurs trained to connect farmers to available machinery in thousands of villages. Accessible info about the latest seeder models and about growing diverse crops like fruits and vegetables.

The roots of burning run shallow

Over the next few years, TNC and local partners across northwest India hope to prevent 6 million tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, while saving 500 billion liters of the region’s stressed water resources.