Techie Starts Organic Farming Despite Family Opposition,

https://bit.ly/3gXEZqT
Roja Reddy, owner of Nisarga Native Farms.

Working for a tech giant in a metro city is a dream come true for many, but it wasn’t for Roja Reddy, who grew up in Donnehalli, a rural village in Karnataka.
With an undying love for agriculture, the 26-year-old dreamt of becoming a farmer. On the contrary, her family, who had been farmers for generations, wanted her to get a well-paying job in the city rather than toil in the soil.
In accordance with her family’s wish, Roja pursued BE and got herself a job in a reputed company in Bengaluru. She continued with her corporate job and kept her desire aside for a while, until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
When her company switched to work-from-home mode, she returned home and decided to finally try her hand at organic farming.
“My father and brother are full-time farmers, but due to huge losses, they were at the verge of giving up altogether. I wanted to do something about this, even though they didn’t want me to farm. So I took it up as a challenge to revive our family farm through organic methods, and started working in the field post 4 pm, after my official work hours,” Roja tells The Better India.

“My family wasn’t convinced that I could revive the land in an organic way, as they had been using only chemical fertilisers for years. But in fact, chemicals were the major reason for the decline in our farm’s produce. After a lot of hard work, I was able to prove them wrong,” says the 26-year-old.
Today, Roja has quit her job and works as a full-time farmer, growing organic vegetables on 50 acres of sprawling land. She now earns around Rs 1 crore in revenue annually, she says.
The essential switch to organic farming
Roja says that when she took up organic farming in 2020, her family, especially her father and brother, opposed her decision. Her relatives and villagers also questioned why she would take up farming when she had a high-paying corporate job in hand.
“The villagers believed that only chemical farming would give them better yield, which was in fact the opposite. Growing up, I saw my grandfather practicing organic farming but my father and brother used chemicals for so long that the quality of the soil had decreased drastically, resulting in very less productivity,” she explains.
Out of the 20 acres of farm land at Donnehalli village in the drought-prone Chitradurga district, only six were used by her family to grow pomegranates. The rest was left unused due to difficulty in irrigation.

Roja requested her family to let her do farming on the unused land and set up her organic vegetable farm on six acres.
Organically cultivated cabbage in Roja’s farm at Donnehalli village.
When she first started farming, she was “ridiculed for adopting organic farming techniques by her relatives, other farmers, villagers, and even the officials of the department of horticulture”, she says.
“I thoroughly studied organic farming on the internet and contacted several other farmers who have been doing it successfully. With their guidance, I was able to grow my own organic vegetable farm within a few months,” she says, adding that she initially grew around 40 different varieties of vegetables including beans, brinjals, and capsicum.
AboutUs https://bit.ly/3GUPFOa
Contact us +919942258153 kvk.subadhra@gmail.com
Thank You Very Much for Sharing YourValuable Thoughts
https://www.digistore24.com/redir/427920/CHUS87/