How is the climate emergency affecting farmers’ harvests?

We speak to farmers in India to understand how they are coping with rapidly changing weather conditions

That advertising professional-turned-farmer and Airbnb host Rohan Fernandes is passionate about the vegetables he grows is self-evident. Visitors to his homestay at Fernandes Wadi, a seaside coconut grove in Uran with a Charles Correa-designed home to boot, will find an oasis of calm. A two-hour drive from Mumbai, it is perfect for city folk looking for some downtime. If you are interested, Fernandes will also give you a tour of the grounds.

Fernandes, a self-taught farmer who has ditched city life to farm on a family property, is eager to learn from his counterparts who have been farming for generations. He can see that experienced farmers—who are virtual food scientists owing to their extensive knowledge—are struggling with rapidly changing weather conditions. “The old norm used to be that after Diwali you put your vegetables to seed,” but this has become harder now, with rains continuing even past Diwali. However, if the ground is wet, it’s possible to grow different crops. Fernandes decided to plant bhindi, which he’d normally seed in the monsoon, and he says, “That paid off, because we got a good harvest.”

The heat is on

The sudden, drastic changes in the weather is apparent to most of us. Across India, heatwaves are more intense, cyclones are becoming more frequent and there’s an unpredictability that makes meteorological forecasts less accurate over a period of time. But for the most part, these changes have had little impact on city dwellers' eating habits. For those tending to the land though, it’s a different matter.

Speaking to Gaytri Bhatia of Vrindavan Farm–located in Palghar, about 115 kilometres outside Mumbai–it quickly becomes apparent that she is someone in tune with the land. When asked if she’s seen any differences in the land during the last couple of years, she reels off an example, sharing, “We’re seeing an explosion of one caterpillar, I’m not sure why. This might be my one theory, without talking to other scientific minds, but maybe the environment has been a lot damper consistently in the past year, and I tend to see the caterpillars in damp piles such as compost piles or next to drain pipes. I don’t know if the entire story has unfurled yet but things are definitely shifting.”

Even for city residents, there’s been a shift that is palpable across local markets, on grocery apps and on restaurant menus. In the last few years, the mango and strawberry seasons have begun to overlap, with strawberries available into March and sometimes even beyond. Meanwhile, boxes of mangoes start appearing on footpaths and in stores towards the middle of March, much earlier than their typical end-April seasonal appearance. While this might be the most visible example of how growing seasons are shifting, those who work on the land are able to describe first-hand the changes that have an impact on our eating habits.

Hard facts

According to the government’s Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI), agriculture contributes ₹6630.37 billion to India’s GDP. This means it makes up 19.9 per cent of the country’s total GDP as per the 2020-21 Economic Survey. For a sector that makes up almost a fifth of the entire economy, the unpredictability that climate change has already caused, as well as the unknown effects it will have in the future, will affect everyone from farmers to consumers.

Pranoy Thipaiah, fifth-generation coffee grower and Managing Partner at Chikmagalur’s Kerehaklu Plantation says about last year, “[In] November and December for about six weeks, we had consistent monsoonal-like rains. It was never-ending. It was depressing. It was damp. It was moist.” Before explaining that it corresponded to an earlier blossom of the coffee plant and therefore, earlier fruiting and ripening, Thipaiah describes the double whammy that he was hit with. During the last harvest season of January 2021, “completely unpredictable and unseasonal rains came through, so our yards were very badly hit and this year, not only our yards but the plant as well [was badly hit].”

The aftermath of the rains impacts not just his crop, but the drying of the coffee cherries as well, which has traditionally been carried out in sprawling open yards, under the sun. The drying process, which can take weeks, allows the natural sugars to ferment and the cherries to dehydrate, resulting in a dried, dense green bean. However the unpredictable rains in recent times means that Thipaiah has had to build a custom-made parabolic drying structure in order to protect the harvest from both heavy rain and extreme sunshine.

These first-hand experiences are echoed in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Special Report on Climate Change and Land, in which the Food Security chapter warns, “Fruit and vegetable production, a key component of healthy diets, is also vulnerable to climate change (medium evidence, high agreement). Declines in yields and crop suitability are projected under higher temperatures, especially in tropical and semi-tropical regions. Heat stress reduces fruit set and speeds up development of annual vegetables, resulting in yield losses, impaired product quality, and increasing food loss and waste. Longer growing seasons enable a greater number of plantings to be cultivated and can contribute to greater annual yields. However, some fruits and vegetables need a period of cold accumulation to produce a viable harvest, and warmer winters may constitute a risk.”

A question of livelihood

An unappreciated aspect of this uncertainty is the inability to plan for farm labour, particularly during harvest time. Bhatia elaborates about mangoes, “If you leave a tree with some fruit and you go to the next tree, it’s not humanly possible; we don’t have the kind of manpower to harvest so quickly. You’ll then end up with loss of fruit on the ground because you won’t return to the tree well in time before the next fruit starts to drop.”

This shortage of labour is one that will only be exacerbated, as weather changes force farmers out of their livelihoods. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report warns that eight per cent of farmland can become unsuitable for farming with a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Bhatia explains that most traditional farmers still harvest in one go, as they don’t have to worry about what happens to the crop after being sold to the trader. The different middlemen are only concerned with their immediate sales and ultimately the consumer is who suffers.

It's not all doom and gloom though. In Alibaug, Good Karma Farms has leased 13 acres of land to work on, and adjust to, the changing climate. It is where Adrienne Thadani is working to create a farm for farmers—using intercropping, different sowing and harvesting times as well as experimenting with natural fertilisers to see what can be shared with local sustenance farmers to improve their yield. Describing the farm, she says, “[It is] a centre for organic practices and studies,” where she hopes to model a five-acre commercial farm and eventually have a training centre. Thadani also intends to have spaces where the farmers and the consumers can interact, hopefully one with a bike trail and organic flower farm on site. The goal is to give farmers and farm workers the tools and knowledge to deal with the future.

Having worked to help set up the farm for Mumbai restaurant The Table—which supplies vegetables to the restaurant—Thadani has experience in the area. She sees farms moving towards “small, diverse pockets that are then easier to control, look after and adapt accordingly.” Bhatia echoes the idea, saying, “You can’t have a single crop on a piece of land, you have to diversify in what you’re growing, and more so now because you’re seeing so many climatic shifts.”

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