The Farmers Made the Fertility on Their Own Farms

The programme treated composting as a skill a farmer could practise and adapt, not an input delivered indefinitely from outside.

Vermicomposting demonstrations expanded to a reported 856 units. Farmers learned to prepare a lined pit, combine soil, dung, grass, leaves and other organic material, hold the moisture and introduce earthworms.

After roughly three to four months a unit could yield two to two-and-a-half quintals of compost and six to ten kilograms of worms. The surplus worms became either an additional product or the seed for the next unit.

The reported saving was more than ₹8,500 per farmer per year on fertiliser, alongside improvements in crop quantity, quality and price.

The pathway underneath those numbers is coherent regardless of how the savings are eventually verified. Farmers acquired a production skill. Material already present in the local farming system was converted into an input. The compost went onto their own plots. Some also prepared liquid vermiwash from locally available material for pest and fertility management.

The knowledge stayed with farmers, which means it could circulate by demonstration and by being watched.

DEHAT facilitated the demonstrations and technical learning under the Trust Community Livelihoods-supported programme. Farmers supplied the labour, the biomass, the daily moisture management and the judgement that decides whether a pit works. Heat, flooding, predators, wrong moisture and labour shortage all end units, and a full account has to include the ones that failed.

Material already present on the farm became the input the farm was buying.