Shri Wefstar D Shira, who is from the small village of Rongbilbanggre in the Gambegre Block of West Garo Hills, Meghalaya, is a Chief Minister’s Award for Green Campaign and one of the most successful and pioneering entrepreneurs of the state. Remarkably ambitious, he was the very first person to start coffee plantation in thispart of Meghalaya and start developing ideas around eco-friendly and organic farming methods. Today Shri Shira has a large coffee plantation and a number of other plantations including black pepper, arecanut and various fruits, he successfully engages in apiculture, and has even set up a rubber plantation that he is trying to develop further. In fact, today Shri Shira is the Coffee Board Association secretary, an inspiring trajectory for an enterprising farmer from a remote part of Meghalaya.
Before getting so deeply engaged in farm-based enterprise, Shri Shira was a primary school teacher. Finding that he was not enjoying teaching as much as he thought he would, he left the job and started his own mixed cropping farm. When he looked around, he saw that people were mainly using slash & burn or Jhum cultivation that was traditional to the region. With greater population in this region and more pressures on land, this traditional farming practice had begun to adversely affect the environment through extensive deforestation. Further, agricultural productivity and income from farming were not high. These observations made Shri Shira interested in developing new approaches to farming; he decided to use his experience to help his fellow farmers develop more productive yet less environmentally damaging farming methods.
Shri Shira’s new ideas initially got him into a lot of trouble with his relatives. They were against his approach of integrated farming. When he planted indigenous species on his farm, some of his relatives cut them down and made him lose almost10,000 plants at one go.But slowly he got over these difficulties and started persuading his kin and community members to allow him to try out these new practices. Shri Shira has three children and is lucky that his family has always supported him. Since his wife is on active duty as a nurse (at Kerapara) his main helper in these ventures is his eldest son.
ORGANIC FARMING
A key point to note about Shri Shira’s farming approach is his strict belief in organic farming. He does not use any fertilizers except using cow dung as manure.
COFFEEPLANTATION
Shri Shira started his coffee plantation back in 1999 as an experiment in farming that could also help conserve the local ecology and also be taken up for organic farming.Knowledge about these farming issues was very limited in those days however; he got little help from anyone.So, his idea of growing coffeestarted taking shape when the Coffee Board took an interest in supporting him and sent him for training to various parts of India. Extremely excited at finally getting this opportunity, Shri Shira poured his heart into learning everythinghe could about growing coffee and eco-friendly coffee farming in particular. By 2005 his coffee farming business was finally underway in a viable manner, and started allowing him to generate sufficient income to support his family.
In 2011, Shri Shira went to Chennai again with the support of the Coffee Board. There he came across a number of ways to do integrated farming on coffee plantations. As this story shall show, this allowed him to then start a number of other farming activities to supplement his coffee growing and start the integrated farming of which he had always dreamt.
Currently Shri Shira grows Robusta coffee – The ripe yields per plant is upto 18 kg, but after drying it comes upto10 kg – and also Arabica coffee – It yields 8 – 10 kg (ripe ones) but after drying it comes only 3 kg. He also has procured mechanised implements for basic processing of the coffee beans, such as an extractor. Shri Shira harvests coffee at least 5 times in a year. Along with Coffee plants, he grows black pepper. He gets around one and a half quintal of black pepper per year.
APICULTURE
As Shri Shira’s reputation grew because of his coffee plantation, one of his relatives who are actively involved in politics suggested that he get linked with the Integrated Basin Development & Livelihoods Promotion (IBDLP) Programme. Upon interacting with people working in the IBDLP Programme, Shri Shira thought that Apiculture could be an interesting supplementary livelihood activity to start. Thus in 2014, Shri Shira went for a beekeeping training programme held at RRTC Umran last year.
Initially Shri Shira only invested in a couple of bee boxes that he installedin his orchard. At this point he thought of beekeeping moreas a hobby. But just a few months later he noticed a remarkably positive change in his coffee plants. Suddenly it seemed as if his coffee plants were flourishing and doing much better than they had ever done! He didn’t understand the reason for this at first but then it suddenly struck him that it must be the bees! He then tried to learn more about bees and discovered how critical they were for pollination and how especially important they were in the case of organic farming. Grateful for the bees’ contribution, he decided to expand his apiculture activities and bring more bees into his farm.
Currently Shri Shira has many different kinds of bees and 25 bee boxes including both wooden and earthen ones. As he explained, during the flowering season honey could be harvested at shorter intervals, within a month. This year for example, he got 6 litres of honey at one go. Shri Shira believes that having a multicropping organic farm allows his bees to make honey in larger volumes and of better quality. For example he discussed how even broom grasscould be used by bees to make honey.
To get different varieties of honey from his bees Shri Shira has planteda lot of broom grass andhundreds of fruit plants of local varieties of fruits such as litchi, jackfruit, neem, many types of indigenous berries, grapefruits, banana, and a citrus fruit for which the Garo region is famous – Memang Narang(Citrus Indica).
Shri Shira has invested in some mechanisation and value addition toward his apiculture activities. For example he has procured a honey extractor for more efficient honey collection, and he also does his own packaging for honey. He typically sells his honey in 350gram bottles which he currently sells at an average price of Rs 150, 200 gram for Rs 100 and 100 gram for Rs 50. Shri Shira sells his honey to the nearest market and in Tura. Otherwise there are people from in and around who comes to his farm to buy the honey particularly during festive seasons when 100 to 200 bottles of honey can be sold in a short time.
In fact apiculture has taken off in a fairly big way in Shri Shira’s community at present. There are even 4 Apiculture Master Trainers in his village today. During the flowering season, honey is collected by a number of entrepreneurs in the village but is typically sold out within just 3 days! It is a testament to the growing demand for honey, especially high quality natural or organic honey from local and indigenous plants
OTHER CROPS ON THE MULTI CROPPING FARM
As described earlier, Shri Shira grows a number of high value crops and fruits on his farm in addition to coffee. For example he grows Black Pepperand gets an annual yield of around one and a half quintal which he sells typically at Rs 600 per kg. He also has around 2000 Arecanutsplants which yield approximately 80 kg. Shri Shira also loves growing different kinds of fruit, particularly for personal consumption and for his bees to make honey! At present he grows Pinweapple which was mainly consumed by him and his family last year, though he sold a bit of surplus for a total of Rs 5000 at the nearest market. Shri Shira especially loves growing different varieties of Mango - Alphonso, Amrapali, Maldai , Lengra and many others.Shri Shira even grows some Oranges and some Vanilla!As of now however, he does not grows these to sell. Finally, Shri Shira has also started a Rubber plantation and currently has around 5000 rubber trees. However he hasn’t started his rubber farm business yet and is only engaged in trial production.
FARM-BASED BUSINESS CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN GARO HILLS – DISCUSSION WITH SHRI SHIRA
According to Shri Shira, possibly the most useful thing he has ever done has been to broaden his exposure to the area of farming via travel to farmers all over India. So far he has travelled to Bihar, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to directly interact with others who are involved in farming and agri-business to learn new methods of farming, understand value addition possibilities, and get ideas for diversifying his livelihood activities. He attributes almost all his success at coffee and integrated farming overall, to his efforts at meeting new people and finding opportunities to learn new things.
Life has come full circle for Shri Shira since today people from all over the country visit him to learn about integrated farming. In fact just last year around 20 - 30 people came to visit him under an exposure trip activity facilitated by the Coffee Board. Additionally, people came to him to learn about integrating apiculture into a farm-based venture, the Soil Department sent people to visit him and learn about mixed cropping, a team from Bangalore came to him to spend some time learning via hands-on farm work and so on.
CHALLENGES
However, Shri Shira has a number of challenges to contend with. Some of them are social; support from his and neighbouring communities is not always forthcoming and affects his business in small ways (Shri Shira declined further questioning on the subject). His plantations for Cashew and Rubber have still not taken off, and he is finding it difficult to access technical support for the same.
Lack of manpower is also a problem for Shri Shira as his land is large but its continuous maintenance fencing, guarding against stray cows and goats, weeding and cleaning etc. – requires costly manpower support. This was a big contributor to his crop loss in the past year.
While today things have turned out well for Shri Shira, he admits that he should have acquired far more technical knowledge and training before he started his ventures in order to have prevented both financial losses and mental stress. In his case he started as a novice and gradually acquired learning through trial and error based experience. As a result, he strongly emphasizes the need for conducting Awareness Programmes and basic training across a number of livelihood sectors for farmers, and thinks that this should be a key activity done by the government.
THE WAY FORWARD AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR GOVERNMENT ACTION
Of all the things Shri Shira has done and continues to do, he wants to primarily focus on Apiculture going forward. When asked why, he says that his farming activities and physically demanding and extremely time consuming. Conversely, bee keeping is not hectic, has turned out to be very enjoyable, and is reasonably lucrative as well. He is working at present on designing movable stands for his bee boxes so that he can easily migrate hisbees from one orchard to the other (the distance between his coffee and rubber plantations for example is nearly 5 km).
In terms of recommendations for government interventions, Shri Shira emphasizes that there should be greater and more systematic focus on both rubber and coffee plantation at the state level, since there are resources available from the central government that the state government could help leverage.
BUILDING A MARKET FOR MEGHALAYAN COFFEE
Shri Shira is passionate about the need for branding and marketing Meghalaya-origin coffee. He points out that India’s 2nd largest coffee supplier are from Garo Hills alone. In factcoffee beans are exported out of the state from Garo Hills itselfto Bangalore (Chikmagalur), and Calcutta.And yet there is no label in the final marketing that specifies the origin of this coffee being the Garo Hills. Thus the coffee farmers in the Garo Hills are not able to build a market presence for their produce, despite it being high quality and hence are not able to get the financial returns they could so easily get if branding and marketing were done.
This is a point upon which Shri Shira has often tried to generate awareness, both among government representatives and his fellow coffee farmers. During his interview, Shri Shira expressly requested the Knowledge Management team to help him reach his voice to the Hon’ble Chief Minister of Meghalaya, and convey the immense potential that the coffee sector has for building economically strong and ecologically sustainable livelihoods for the state’s farmers.