She’s one for the farmers

Anuradha, a graduate in Home Science and a gold medalist from Acharya N. G. Ranga Agricultural University (Textile and Apparels Management), assisted her husband in the advertising field for a few years. But then, her penchant for entrepreneurship got the better of her.

Recalling how she took to hydroponic cultivation, she shares, “I come from an agricultural family, and always dreamt of doing something for the farmers. I learnt that farmers in my village Ibrahimpatnam (on Hyderabad’s outskirts) were finding it difficult to produce a good harvest. They had to procure seeds from Pune, which was a tiresome and expensive process. It was then that I decided to produce the seedlings myself. I quit advertising and trained with a scientist for six months and learnt the nuances of hydroponic cultivation. I also researched and read several books on the operations of a poly house.”

She had to wither the storm, though. “Being a woman can make it difficult to deal with farmers. At times seedlings get damaged in transport and farmers return them. Other times, they don’t plant seedlings on time, and as a result, they die. But they find fault in the seedlings’ quality, so we replace them. Even monitoring the temperature in the ploy house isn’t easy,” she explains.

To counter the growing number of tasks, Anuradha hired women farmers. “I’ve mostly employed women because I believe they have the finesse to deal with delicate seedlings,” she reasons.

Anuradha is glad that she’s able to increase farmers’ efficiency by 25 per cent with superior quality seedlings. “When farmers sow seeds, not all of them germinate. A loss of around 20 per cent, due to various factors like the uncertainty of rainfall, fungal diseases, changing climatic conditions, etc. is natural. But here, we constantly monitor everything. Once the seed is germinated in the poly house, we place it in the shade for better nutrition, and after a few days, we put them in a net to protect from insects. We add liquid fertilisers to the seedlings and monitor them for Ph and EC measurements on a daily basis. So, when the farmers receive the seedlings they are all of uniform age, height and health, alongside being disease-free with good root systems. It takes more than a month for a farmer to get to the seedlings stage, but I can do it in under 25 days and guarantee a 99 per cent success rate.”

Apart from providing seedlings of vegetables like brinjal, drumstick, banana, tomato, ginger, leafy vegetables, chilly, papaya and marigold, the 42-year-old also provides advice to farmers. She also supplies flowering seedlings to Raj Bhavan, RFC, Public Gardens and the state’s horticultural departments among others.