Sunday Nov 24, 2024
Sunday Nov 24, 2024
Friday, 27 September 2019 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Farming is not an easy vocation. Apart from backbreaking work, it involves a lot of hard work and at times life threatening risks. Our farmers in the north are the most destitute; they lost their homes, fields, kith and kin and cattle to plough the fields, cutting machines and harrows and now lost their dignity too, having sold out to loan sharks.
Grains n Greens Ltd., producers of ‘Akshata’ brand of health rice has recognised the time and energy this community invests on a daily basis, and have initiated a novel project named ‘Akshata Farming Heroes’ for the benefit of farmers.
Grains n Greens Managing Director Roshan Perera states, “The company has invested its efforts in training farmers in organic farming using the latest technology. Our CSR project involves training and passing on knowledge to rice farmers providing them with information on weather, soil conditions, growing techniques, fertiliser and other agriculture-related advice. They help produce three extremely rare heirloom rice varieties that was at one time the rice of the royalty, namely; Forbidden Rice, Kuruluthuda and Heenati Non GMO rice. This project benefits more than 800 farmers in organic farming. The project was initiated in order to produce these rice varieties that are becoming extinct, resulting in the dependence of hybrid rice varieties. Furthermore, it is to alleviate these rice farming communities that are fast disappearing.”
Grains n Greens has come up with a customisable online system of voting for your farmer as per the name of farmer indicated on the Akshata Rice pack. It is the first of its kind concept in the world, where all inquiries about the Akshata Farming Heroes and voting for farmer could be done online by accessing akshata-farmingheroes.org
The Akshata Farming Heroes campaign is aimed at supporting local farmers who are seeing terrible times due to bad weather and difficult circumstances. Due to the recent unfavourable weather patterns, the project helped the farmers to solve the drought issue by implementing drip irrigation. This ensured an economic use of water and use of biodynamic techniques which improve soil water retention capacity and groundwater levels.
The company is also taking initiatives to encourage more youth into taking up farming. With correct education, safety measures and CSR support, the country will be able to raise more farmers and salvage the loss it suffered in the last decade.
“We at Akshata have steadily increased the livelihood of many of our cluster communities which are registered as Green Force One, Two, Three, etc. You can help us elevate the poorest farmers increase their annual income from less than $ 600 to over $ 2,000,” Perera added.
