Bullish turn

Post mechanisation, for the first time there is innovation in farm equipment to revive bullocks and aid small farmers

- SHAGUN

SIMHACHALAM calls himself a bullock entrepreneur. Each agricultural season, this farmer from Andhra Pradesh Sangra village travels with his pair of bullocks to work on other people's farms in nearby villages for a fee. Like most other parts of the country, bullocks in these tribal villages are traditionally used only for ploughing and transportation. But Simhachalam uses his bullocks for weeding and sowing. “I learnt how to use a bullock-mounted weeding implement at a training programme in 2018. Today, I carry out weeding in at least 150 other farms,” says the 32-year-old, adding that he charges ₹ 750 for weeding 1 ha. The job takes me six hours, while manual weeding takes two days and the labor cost is around ₹1,600 for a farm of that size, he says. In June 2021, Simhachalam attended another training programme on using bullocks for sowing. “I used an instrument called vithinigalla, essentially a seed pipe, and finished sowing on my 1 ha farm in under an hour. Many farmers from the gram panchayat came to see the process, he says. Eight other farmers in his gram panchayat have now started using their bullocks for sowing.

What Simhachalam is doing is a departure from the overall trend in the farm sector, where tractors and other machines have progressively replaced bullocks.

M L Sanyasi Rao, programme manager, Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN), a non-profit that organized the sowing training using bullocks, says, Almost every farm household in the region owns bullocks. We are trying to promote their use in farming as it makes economic and logistical sense for small farmers. Besides Visakhapatnam, WASSAN IS popularising the use of bullocks in three other Andhra Pradesh districts-Srikakulam, East Godavari and Vizianagaram.