Weltacker delegation visiting the Andhra Pradesh Community-managed Natural Farming players, March 2025. Photo: Benny Haerlin

When Sowjanya Soujanaya goes to her ATM garden in Edulamaddali in the morning, she not only finds enough herbs, spices and tubers to cook a healthy lunch for her family of five, but also always finds something to sell at the market. ATM stands for "Any Time Money" and is a mixed cultivation of more than 20 different kinds of vegetables, berries, roots and herbs on the 800 m2 in front of her house.

She doesn't use pesticides or subsidised fertiliser. "It’s all natural!" laughs Sowjanya. It's easy to see how this young woman in a colourful sari has managed to attract 2,300 followers on her YouTube channel.

The key to success is a few clear rules for cultivating diversity, constant experimentation and accurate documentation of the results. The farmer, who has already trained several neighbours, meticulously records everything that happens in the ATM garden in a thick book: Sowing, mulching, transplanting, pests, beneficials, treatments used and, of course, the harvest weight, quality and sales.

She sends important data by mobile phone to the central office in Guntur, the headquarters and data centre of the Andhra Pradesh Community-managed Natural Farming.

Author: Benedikt Haerlin

Sowjanya Soujanaya and her husband in the ATM garden. Photo: Benny Haerlin

This pelleting makes it possible for the "desert to turn green" as early as April. This creates a third season between the two traditional planting seasons (Kharif in summer and Rabi in winter).

The plant mix in the fields "harvests" the missing water from the morning dew and the water vapour in the air; the greater the biomass, the more effective. And the more porous and rooted the soil is, even in the deeper layers, the more moisture it stores in its interstices. These are created by the diversity of roots and their microorganisms, and are maintained over the years by minimal tillage.

This organic loosening – the opposite of conventional soil compaction – improves the water balance and revitalises the soil by creating ideal living conditions for the soil microbiome. It is one of the central principles of the Natural Farming programme, which has developed very dynamically over the last 10 years.

Natural Farming differs from chemical farming – which no one in India calls "conventional farming" – in that it uses a range of biostimulants. Notably Jeevarutham (a formulation of fermented cow urine, dung, legume flour, water and fertile soil) promotes germination and a diverse microbiome of bacteria and fungi that help the plants extract the micronutrients they need from the soil.

The basic idea is that plants put about 40 percent of the sugars they produce through photosynthesis into the above-ground biomass and 30 percent into the roots. The remaining 30 percent is fed to fungi and microorganisms in the soil, which in turn provide other nutrients.

Nature’s sophisticated carbon capture mechanism. Graphic: Vijay Kumar Thallam, RySS

According to Natural Farming theory, all of the nutrients the crops require – at least under the region’s subtropical growing conditions – can be ensured by the right mix and sequence of plants (with their specific composition of roots, leaves and exudates), maximum biomass, and a stable, diverse microbiome. Even biostimulants are largely unnecessary in the long term once the locally adapted microbiome has been established.

"There is no need for a single gram of external nutrients, synthetic or organic," is the radical hypothesis that over a million farmers in Andhra Pradesh are now successfully working to prove. Combined with the plant residues that remain in and on the soil, another theory is that fertile topsoil can be built up over a number of years instead of centuries, by continuously incorporating into the soil sufficient biomass with the right consistency and biological dynamics. The right diversity of plants and microorganisms is also crucial.

All these agricultural paradigm shifts, the APCNF representatives emphasise, are based on the traditional and indigenous knowledge of the region, but in their current form they are cutting-edge science inspired by leading soil microbiologists in the US and Australia. These new technologies are implemented and honed by “farmer scientists” on the ground.

Through observation and experimentation, careful documentation, sharing and replication across sites, they are developing new models for different crops and cropping systems. These include new combinations and, generally, even greater diversity in the fields, the integration of palm, cacao and fruit trees, the use of drones to apply biostimulants to rice fields, new pumping and irrigation systems, or determining quality by measuring the sugar dissolved in the plants.

In the case of pre-monsoon dry sowing, after the first 11 pilot fields in 2018, the number of participating farms increased from 21,000 in 2019 to 863,000 in 2023, and the area from 15,000 to 385,000 hectares.

Farmers with biostimulants. Photo: Benny Haerlin

Kumar welcomes us to RySS's headquarters in a plain exposed concrete building on the dusty outskirts of Guntur, one of the administrative centres of the state where India's "green revolution" of the 1960s began with high-yielding varieties, massive irrigation and increasing amounts of artificial fertiliser and pesticides. Now, he hopes, a new, truly green agricultural revolution could begin here.

Since 2016, RySS has received massive financial and organisational support from the state of Andhra Pradesh. In contrast to the EU model of subsidies, however, the concept of RySS is complete independence of the farmers from government payments. RySS receives money to provide the services but the farmers themself are entirely independent of any subsidies (cheap fertiliser is the government’s multi-billion subsidy programme for chemical farmers).

The APCNF movement has reached more than a million farms in ten years by relying on the powers of persuasion and innovation of the farmers themselves. Smallholders are trained in how to apply the methods, but also to disseminate them: “Champions” document their experiences and show how APCNF works in their fields.

Kumar calls it “the art of upscaling”:

“We don't want to convert individual farmers; we want to convert whole villages, starting with the small farmers and the poorest of the poor who have no land at all,” he explains. “Everything has to pay off from the beginning, so that people who have no reserves are convinced.”

Most practitioners of APCNF cultivate one to two acres, or 4,000 to 8,000 square metres. 10 acres, a good 4 hectares, is already impressive, and 50 acres makes the owner a big farmer who pays a team of seasonal labourers a meagre daily wage of around 200 rupees, just over 2 euros. The average size of all farms in India has fallen from two hectares to one hectare since the 1970s.

Since 2023, RySS has been offering a four-year bachelor's degree programme for women farmers through the Indo-German Global Academy for Agroecology Research and Learning, with a loan from the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, in which 500 students are trained primarily by 180 farmer mentors. 75 percent of their learning takes place in their own fields, supported by online mentoring. The final project is also their own field and a presentation about it to their neighbours.

RySS polycrop model for black gram. Photo: Benny Haerlin

Precise recipes and cropping plans, exact cost, harvest and yield figures, and comparisons between Natural Farming and chemical farming fields that are as close as possible to each other are displayed on large banners at the site, including the documented failures of Natural Farming.

The APCNF's arguments are convincing: harvests are rarely inferior, often better, and in any case far more profitable for the farmers, who do not have to buy expensive inputs and always harvest a variety of vegetables, herbs, nuts, oil and legumes in addition to their main crop.

There is also a steady improvement in soil productivity through additional harvests and greater resistance to heat, drought, floods and severe weather, such as the regular tropical cyclones that hit Andhra Pradesh from its 1,000-kilometre coastline. In addition, the village economy is being revitalised through local sources of income, such as the production of various preparations and the first forms of cooperative marketing of surpluses that do not serve the community's subsistence needs.

Women’s self-help group. Photo: Benny Haerlin

Women farmers, in particular, see the main benefit as improved health for the whole family through a good, varied diet and the avoidance of pesticides. The strong backbone of the movement is, in fact, the local women's self-help groups, which play an essential role in the economic transformation as savings associations, lenders and guarantors. They finance the independent purchase of the cow that is indispensable for the preparations, the necessary basic equipment or the first lease for women farmers who are setting up on their own.

Even before former German Chancellor Angela Merkel presented him with the prestigious Gulbekian Prize for Humanity in 2024, Kumar was convinced that APCNF was the right solution for sustainable, climate-smart and resilient agriculture, rural solidarity, empowerment of women, poverty alleviation and healthy nutrition far beyond Andhra Pradesh.

Farmers presents their plants. Photo: Benny Haerlin

Kumar last year persuaded the Indian central government to test and replicate the model in other states. But his radical challenge to the chemical-based paradigm is still anathema to the grandees of the agricultural universities. Despite the international scientific validation that the method has now received, the aging elite of chemical agriculture still regard it as, at best, a care measure for the poor.

Beyond the direct benefits to small farmers, however, APCNF can make an invaluable contribution to solving the major challenges of climate change mitigation and adaptation, soil and water management, avoiding poisoning and over-fertilisation, improving health, food quality and micronutrient supply, and, last but not least, creating a community-managed rural economy that could halt the rural exodus. Believing in the multiplicity and power of diversity is much more than a farming method.