"My husband and I make all decisions about the farm together."

"I have to sit a bit away from the door. You know, it is the village custom. I am a married lady and shouldn’t be seen by people older than me. I shouldn’t make eye contact. I would like to change that, but some things are hard to change. Customs and traditions make an integral part of our culture, but they also make life tough sometimes.

I was keen on getting a higher education as a young girl. I went to school for four years. I was always the best of my class, I am still proud of that. But when it was time to move on to highschool, my grandmother wouldn’t allow it. And the school was far away. The boys were sent to school - not me. I went to the sewing centre in my village and later on I could train other women in sewing. That was until I got married. It wasn’t always easy. Initially my husband had to work in a textile factory. It was tough work; operating the loud machineries, working all day long in the hot, stuffy factory halls.

Now we are managing the farm together. He inherited the land from his parents and we have been producing organic cotton for the past fifteen years. It is still hard work on the farm; we get up at five in the morning to milk the cows, we work in the fields from eight in the morning, going home around three in the afternoon, when I start preparing dinner for the family. But we can decide ourselves how we want to work.

My husband and I take all decisions about the farm and finances together. We supervise the field workers together, him the men and me the women workers. We are about to start harvesting the cotton, which is traditionally a task where women do the work. We pick the cotton from the opened bolls by hand. Today is the market day in our village which means it is also pay day for our labourers, so that they can go and get the groceries they need.

The farm is going well and we are able to send our kids to school and college. We are now also part of a farmer research program of the SysCom project. Together with the research team we try out innovations in our fields, some of them we can adopt later on to further improve our organic cotton production.

I want to continue learning, I want to learn embroidery and knitting. And I want to see things change. And they do, slowly but surely. It makes me happy to see the little girls in our village going to school. My conviction is that both men and women should be treated equally and be granted the same opportunities."

Manjula Patel is 40 years old. She and her husband Mansingh Narayan live in Satrati. They are participating in the SysComs on-farm research since 2015. They have been registered organic cotton farmers with Remei India Ltd since 2013.

More portraits

fibl.org: Faces of Organic Cotton