And at one crucial point in time, when Amith lost one of his clients to cancer, he made his decision to leave the corporate world and follow in his grandfather’s footsteps.
New Delhi: In today’s world, more and more people opt for organic goods for daily-use purposes, and these organic products often comes with an additional price tag for being closer to nature. Amith Kishan, a former banker, saw an opportunity in the organic farming sector that is still largely unorganised in the country.
Amith Kishan’s farm in Andhra Pradesh is a tranquil place where farmers sow only indigenous seeds, bulls are free on the field to plough the soil, cows graze on pollution-free open grasslands, and rural women are busy making ghee in an earthen pot heated over a slow wooden fire, according to The Better India.
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Banker To Farmer – Amit Kishan’s Journey
Amith worked with with several banks like ICICI, Bajaj, Axis, HDFC, and Punjab National Bank (PNB) handling top corporates in Bengaluru in a span of eight years. However, he always wanted to follow his roots and become a farmer like his grandfather was.
“My grandfather was a renowned farmer in the area. As a child, we used to go to the farm and play with soil while he worked on the field,” he recalls, as reported by The Better India.
And at one crucial point in time, when Amith lost one of his clients to cancer, he made his decision to leave the corporate world and follow in his grandfather’s footsteps.
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“There was a person who was insured with me. In a span of 1.5 years, he died of cancer. I did all the claiming formalities for the family. Looking at this, I understood that we need to correct ways of how we are living, and what we are eating as our food is not up to the mark. I wanted to correct that. Everything was pushing me to do something better,” he said in the report.
He co-founded Hebbevu Farms in 2019 with the help of his brother. Both of them tried everything possible to know what suits them the best.
“We did not know what to grow and when. When farmers in the neighbouring fields grew chillies, we would grow groundnuts. We did not understand the kharif and rabi seasons,” Amith said recalling their initial months.
After three years of research and development, he co-founded Hebbevu Farms in 2019 with his brother Ashrith. “We started everything from scratch. We met many organic farmers to understand the nitty-gritty of farming,” he adds.
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Challenges They Faced
It’s hard for natural farming to sustain when there’s a booming market of fertilizer and chemical-based farming around you. It’s not just the cost-factor, the soil quality, the kind of micro-organisms in the soil everything gets affected when farming gets too much away from the nature.
“All the farmers in surrounding fields were using chemicals to grow food. At that point in time when I started growing food without chemicals, people termed me a fool and laughed at me. They would spray chemicals and insects would attack my farm. In order to survive, I tried to educate them as well on natural and organic ways of farming,” Amith recounted.
In order to attain a better root growth, Amith started ploughing the soil below 4 feet. He replaced chemical fertilisers with cow dung, cow urine, and bananas to boost potassium levels in the soil.
“As a result, we started seeing earthworms back in our soil, which became very rare because of chemicals used in farming. But the boost in farming was observed when we introduced native animals to our farms,” he said.
Amith’s farm today houses nearly 700 indigenous cows and buffaloes including Gir, Sahiwal, and Jafarabadi said the report.
“The cows, buffaloes, and bulls help us practise natural farming, sell dairy products, make biogas, and boost farm tourism,” Amith told The Better India.
The farm’s dependency on solar power has reduced his monthly power expenses from Rs 3 lakh to Rs 40,000.
Starting with a loan of Rs 1.5 crore and a 15-acre farmland, today Amith clocks an annual revenue of Rs 21 crore from his field spread across 650-acre farmland.
