What is climate smart farming?
Climate Smart Farming is an integrated approach to address the interlinked challenges of food security and climate change. Four major aspects of Climate Smart Farming are:
As a pilot, with guidance from ITC and support from National Horticultural Mission (NHM), 23 farmers of Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh have set up a unique initiative in the dry lands - climate smart shade nets to produce seedlings & vegetables with unit size ranging from 0.5 to 1 acre. The shade nets enable farmers to grow multiple crops - seedlings from June to September and vegetables from October to March ensuring maximum utilization of resources thereby increasing farmer income levels significantly. Vegetables such as European cucumber, Capsicum - Green, Yellow & Red, Beet root, Tomato, Brinjal, Green chillies and Cabbage have proved to be very successful with very good yields.
ITC's role in this model
Apart from guidance to the farmers, ITC has played the critical role of creating an entire value chain. The steps included were:
Impact on farmers
With this intervention ITC has developed farmer entrepreneurs in villages thereby generating more employment opportunities. In this model, a farmer holding an acre of shade net with full production has the potential to increase their additional earning capacity by Rs. 4.5 Lakhs per annum.