Uzhavukkarangal Farmers Producer Company Limited

You can find us over at 44/4A1 in Allur, which is right near Seithiathope. We call ourselves Uzhavukkarangal, which basically means the hands that plow. That’s exactly what we are—a group of farmers who spend most of our time out in the dirt. We decided to start this company because we were tired of seeing all the profit go to people who don’t even know what a plow looks like. We’re local people, mostly neighbors who have been farming these same plots of land for generations. Our office is just a plain building where we keep our records and meet up to discuss the next planting season. It’s not very formal. We usually have a lot of mud on our boots and a lot on our minds. We talk about the water from the canals and how the soil is holding up after the last crop. We don’t have a big marketing plan or anything like that. We just want to grow good food and sell it for a price that lets us keep our farms going. It’s a hard life sometimes, especially when the weather turns bad, but we stick together. We share what we know and help each other out with equipment or labor when things get busy. We’re just regular folks trying to make a living from the land we love. That’s the long and short of it.