Ilayankudi Vayalaga Jeevidam Farmers Producer Company Limited

Ilayankudi Vayalaga Jeevidam Farmers Producer Company Limited is located at No. 40, Oversear Pillai St, which is right near the Head Post Office here in Sivagangai. Most people just know us as the local farmers group. We called it Vayalaga because the fields are where our lives are. We aren't corporate types; we are people who spend more time in the dirt than in an office. The office on Oversear Pillai St is where we handle the boring stuff like papers and meetings, but our hearts are really out in the villages. We started this because the small farmers in Ilayankudi were getting a raw deal on their own. By joining up, we can at least talk to the buyers with a bit more weight behind us. It is not always easy. Sometimes the rains fail and everyone is miserable, or sometimes we produce so much that the prices drop. We just try to navigate those ups and downs together. If you drop by the office, you’ll see it’s a pretty basic place. We don’t have air conditioning or fancy chairs. We just have some benches and our records. It’s a place for real talk about crops and prices. We are just trying to make sure that the people who grow the food around here can actually afford to live and keep their land. We’ve been at this for a few years now and it’s always a learning process for us.