Zero-budget farming raises incomes but demands more labour and time: study

A staggering 87% of those using the method have not been able to get a better price for their produce than those who did not go for it

The good news is that crop yields of more than 90 per cent of farmers increased after they adopted Zero-Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF), popularised by agriculturist Subhash Palekar. The flip side is that an overwhelming majority of those who practice the much-talked-about system (around 87 per cent) have not been able to get a better price for their produce than those who didn’t opt for it, while their requirement for manual labour and the time consumed have risen, a new study has found.

The study was conducted by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) on the basis of focused group discussions by its researchers with 142 farmers, along with in-depth interviews with 40 cultivators from 35 villages in 10 districts of Andhra Pradesh.

It was done in June 2019 and was released today as part of a report on, ‘State of Organic and Natural Farming in India–Challenges and Possibilities,’ by NITI Aayog vice chairman Rajiv Kumar.

About 70 per cent of the 142 farmers in the study had more than three years of ZBNF (ZBNF) farming experience and 85 per cent were practicing it on their entire land, the study clarified.

CRZBNF, or Climate-resistant Zero-Budget Natural Farming also simply called ZBNF, is a method of farming wherein all critical inputs are gathered from the field and nothing is introduced from outside.

This system is different from organic farming and Subhash Palekar has been one its oldest proponents, though there are several variants of ZBNF practiced by different farmers across India.

Though in vogue since several years, ZBNF caught popular imagination when the 2018 Economic Survey advocated it as a lucrative livelihood option for small farmers, while the very next day, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Budget speech, mentioned it as one of the innovative models through which farmers’ income could be doubled by 2022.

Meanwhile, the study found that almost 90 per cent of the farmers who were interviewed felt that their net incomes from ZBNF farms rose as compared to non-ZBNF farms though there was no premium attached to their produce as production cost went down.

Farmers also said that they experienced a decline in their yields for various crops in the first one or two years or seasons of transition from chemical farming to ZBNF, but subsequently after a few seasons or years, ZBNF yield became equal or increased by 5–350 per cent in two-thirds of the crop plots.

“The transition period for ZBNF yield to become equal to yield from chemical-based farming was one to four years,” the report found.

Interestingly, the ZBNF farmers interviewed for the CSE study found a decrease in their farming expenses largely due to non-use of chemical inputs and availability of inputs such as cow urine, dung and desi seeds at home.

“For individual farmers, farming expenses decreased in 90 per cent of the cases and remained the same in 10 per cent of the cases. Farming expenses for ZBNF crops decreased by 15–80 per cent. Not a single case of increase in farming expenses was observed,” the study found.

A big drawback of ZBNF was that almost 60 per cent of the farmers felt that it required more manual labour as ZBNF farms need more time, discipline and attention, and are labor-intensive as they require bio-input preparation and application, de-weeding, and harvesting of different crops at different times.

PARAMETER	INCREASE	SAME	DECREASE
ON YIELD	57%	35%

8%

ON FARM EXPENSES

0% 0% 100%

PRICE RECEIVED FOR ZBNF PDTS

13% 87% 0%

ON MANUAL LABOUR

78% 7% 15%

ON NET INCOME

90% 10% 0%

SOURCE: BASED ON RESPONSE FROM 142 ZBNF PRACTISING FARMERS AS PUBLISHED IN THE REPORT ON, ‘STATE OF ORGANIC AND NATURAL FARMING IN INDIA –CHALLENGES AND POSSIBILITIES BY CSE