In a move to help organic farmers and to promote healthy eating, two youngsters have started an organisation, ‘EPPO’, to purchase organic produce from farmers at their farms and sell them to residents of Vellore and Ranipet districts in e-vehicles.
The youngsters, B. Arun Kishore and P. Karthikeyan, have tied up with the Certified Organic Farmers Association to provide free training to farmers and convert them to organic methods of agriculture from conventional farming methods, which use chemical fertilizers.
Every morning members of EPPO procure the products from the farmers at their respective farms and distribute them at the doorsteps of the people using two e-vehicles. “Each vehicle has 22 racks with packed organic vegetables. The vehicles go through the streets of Vellore and Ranipet playing audio announcements about the benefits of such produce,” said Mr. Arun Kishore.
He said that people have been consuming chemicals in the name of vegetables. “The organic farmers, on the other hand, are unaware about marketing strategies. Hence we directly procure vegetables from the farmers at a price that brings them profit, grade them and sell the good quality produce to the residents,” said G.S. Purushoththaman, director, Organic Farming Organisation and president of the Certified Organic Farmers Association.
He said that across Tamil Nadu, there are one lakh organic farmers and around 10,000 in Vellore, Tiruvannamalai, Tirupathur and Ranipet. “The government of India has authorized the Organic farming Organisation Vellore as the Regional Council for Participatory Guarantee System to certify the organic products produced by the farmers since 2011,” he said.
Arun Kishore said that farmers do not have time to come to the towns and sell their products. “We sell them to the public and the amount is used to pay our staff and maintain the e-vehicles. We are trying to introduce this system in Chennai too,” he added.
“Earlier, we were not able to sell the produce daily. We used to sell the produce once a week and sometimes send it to Chennai. These youngsters are purchasing it daily from us and we are able to earn a good income,” said M. Ramesh, an organic farmer from Elavambadi, Anaicut Taluk.
