Lahu-Krushna Agro Producer Company Limited

Over in Churmapuri, there is a small house, number 311, where we run the Lahu-Krushna Agro Producer Company Limited. It is right in the middle of our village in the Ambad taluka of Jalna. We named the company after what we care about. Life in Jalna mostly revolves around the changing seasons and the rains. When the monsoon is good, everyone has a smile, but when it fails, we all feel the weight of it. We set this company up so we could talk to the banks and the big buyers as one single group instead of being scattered. One farmer by himself doesn't have much power at the market, but dozens of us together can actually get things done. We spend a lot of our time sitting on the porch of the house talking about the current price of cotton or how the pigeon peas are growing. We don't have a computer that works every day, so we still do most of our record-keeping by hand in those big green ledgers. It is a bit old-fashioned, but it works for what we need. We really want to make sure that our children don't feel they have to move to the big cities just to find a decent job. If we can make the farms here a bit more stable, maybe they will choose to stay. We make plenty of mistakes along the way, but we keep trying because our livelihood depends on this land.