KASARGOD: Smile at plants and they will smile back at you,” so reads a banner at the entrance to Sreevidya M’s house at Niduvote, an arid village in Bedadka panchayat. To reach her house, one has to get off the Poinachi-Bandaduka road at Baroti and take a 300m rocky trail that cuts through dry terrain.
Her four acres of land and the neighbourless house is an oasis of greenery on the dry rolling uplands.
“My property was also rocky and run over by dry grass. It took me five years to turn my patch green,” says Sreevidya (34), the recipient of the state government’s Young Female Farmer Award announced on Thursday. The recognition comes with a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh.
Farmer Sreevidya is introduced by the passion fruit trellis over the long driveway to her house. “Passion fruit helped me a lot in bringing greenery to his place,” she says holding on to low-lying fruits.
Today, she has 40 different types of fruit trees, grows vegetables such as green chilli, okra, brinjal, lettuce, tomato, cucumber and beans. “This season, I sold red lady papaya worth Rs 40,000,” she says.
She also has two cows, 70 hens, maintains four fish ponds, and Billu, an Indian native dog. She was the first farmer in her village to embrace aquaponics. “I had to because my property did not have soil for farming,” she says.
Agriculture officials told her she could grow only leafy vegetables but she tried strawberries and got a bumper crop. Impressed by her openness to embracing modern farming, the panchayat and the fisheries department decided to set up the first biofloc tank at her house. Biofloc culture is a new technique to farm fish where the water need not be changed. “Now many men also have biofloc tanks in their house,” she says, not hiding her pride in being the first. She farms carp, tilapia, and anabas fish in the ponds.
If one were to think her hands are full, there is more. She is an accountant with a travel agency in Kasaragod and leaves home every day at 8.30 am and returns at 6.30 pm.
In 2015, Sreevidya and her husband Radhakrishnan M, a sales executive in Dubai, built their house at Neduvote, on the land she inherited from her parents. She started farming on the rocky terrain by trapping rainwater. “Initially, I started with plantain and taros,” she says. When several of her neighbours gave up their land for granite quarrying, she decided to use the gunpowder to make pits for planting coconut seedlings. “We used the same technique used in quarries to trigger implosions and create pits for coconut trees,” she says.
Around her house, there are coconut trees. In another plot of 60 cents, she dumped truckloads of laterite soil to create a bed for farming. There too she planted coconut, mango, and jackfruit trees. There is a hog plum tree too which she planted when she was a little girl. Once, when Veena Rani R, deputy director of agriculture, visited her house, she came to know that Sreevidya used to water vegetables till 1 am.
“I immediately recommended she install drip irrigation across her farm. The department subsidised the system too,” the official says. She says Sreevidya gives away seeds of vegetables to others free of cost to bring them to farming. “Only those with a good heart can be a good farmer. She has a good heart too,” says Rani, who asked Sreevidya to apply for the young farmer’s award.