"I had this dream of the farm providing for me."

"Everyone told me to sell the farm. Sell the farm, take the money and try my luck somewhere else. Anyway, it wouldn’t work - me trying to run the farm on my own. How would I learn how to farm? How would I know what to do?

After my father died when I was ten years old my mother could not make ends meet and had to give me to my uncle. I was the youngest of five kids and all my older sisters have already married and moved away. I would see my mother on weekends but we were living apart. My uncle gave me a place to stay and food, you might say he was providing me a home. That was in exchange for my work. I was working in his tea stall. Making snacks and tea, serving his customers. Those were long, tiring days. I struggled a lot.

My father was a farmer, he owned the land. So when he died we had to rent out the land. I was too young to already learn from him the principles of farming, how would I possibly be able to run a farm on my own? The rational choice would have been to sell it. But I had this dream. This dream of the farm providing for me, building a real home, growing my own big family. So, I kept it. Then I married my wife. That was when things finally started to change for me. I got a lot of help on the farm from her father and brother-in-law. I started to learn from everyone: from my brother-in-law, neighbours, and the workers on the fields. I started to learn new ways of farming.

Fifteen years ago, I switched to organic farming. Nowadays, even when conventional farmers visit my fields, they are so impressed they become tempted to convert to organic farming. Also, you have to see that the yields of conventional fields with genetically modified cotton are going down here. So, farmers start looking for alternatives. Some become interested in organic farming, some want to drop cotton production, and others still want to leave farming altogether. They always ask me what my secret to success in farming is. You might say it is the quality of my compost and manure. But I believe it has two basic qualities: hard work and honesty. And faith. Faith in gods, in their goodwill, and faith in myself.

But in some way, they were right, those people all those years ago telling me I can’t do it by myself: I wouldn’t have been able to run the farm on my own. Only with the support and love of my wife, her family, and finally, our own kids were we able to make this dream come true. This dream that I had all these years back, the dream that persisted."

Kamal Chand Namdev is 65 years old and lives in Dogawa. He is participating in the SysCom on-farm research since 2014. He has been a registered organic cotton farmer with Remei India Ltd since 2013.

More portraits

fibl.org: Faces of Organic Cotton