Team Bedakam Kudumbashree Agro Farmers Producer Company Limited

Our group is based in the Bedadka area, and we have a small office at 8/483-H in the Panchayath Shopping Complex. We are a farmer producer company that came out of the Kudumbashree movement. Most of us are women from the local villages around Chengalam. We started this because we wanted to have more control over our farming and how we sell our produce. Being in the shopping complex means there is always a lot of activity around us. You can hear people talking and the sound of motorcycles passing by all day. In our office, we spend time planning which seeds to buy and how to help each other with the labor in the fields. It is a very grassroots kind of operation. We don't have a lot of money for fancy things, so we make do with what we have. Most of the work is done out in the sun, in the small plots of land that our members own. We use the office just to stay organized. It’s a lot of talking and a lot of shared effort. We have learned a lot since we started, mostly through trial and error. Some days it is hard to get everyone on the same page, but we are all from the same community, so we figure it out eventually. We are just a team of local people trying to make farming work for our families and our neighborhood.