About 70% of people live in villages in India, which has a mostly agrarian economy and relies heavily on livestock for socio-economic sustenance. A symbiotic relationship exists between agriculture and animal husbandry in which the former supplies feed and fodder for livestock while the latter produces milk, bio-waste, and draught power for various agricultural processes.
In India, dairy farming has changed from being merely an agrarian way of life to becoming a professionally run sector. Dairy farming is a significant supplementary source of income for many rural Indian families. It is essential that these farmers adopt sustainable and best practices along with efficient dairy management techniques to ensure optimum production and earnings from dairy farming.
Our proposed solution which we have termed ‘Har Khet Gaushala’, is to provide project-based financing to identified farmer clusters, who are wanting to adopt dairy farming.
In our cluster-based model, we bring together identified farmer groups, in batches, who will be given complete support right from training, guidance and support throughout their dairy farming phase right from sourcing the good breed of cows, rearing of cows, ensuring they adopt and follow the best practices, and most important of all - provide financial support to purchase all the inputs required for dairy farming and other secondary requirements including fencing, etc. This project will eventually be cost saving and an income generator.
Since we are working in clusters, a large volume of output is available at any given time for buyers, which gives us the ability to demand price based on volume, quality and consistency of the milk supplied. Working with clusters allows us to have commercially viable operations and output management and achieve economies of scale. Through this model we are in a position to support hundreds of small and marginal farmers to adopt progressive, farm-based income generating activities.
