“Agriculture has the word culture in it,” says Kavita Sah, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at CNH Industrial India, in our latest installment in the Breaking New Ground webisode series. She goes on to explain how a huge cultural shift was required from local farmers who were used to burning their land to dispose of their waste straw.
Working in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture, CNH Industrial chose the village of Kallar Majri in the Punjab area of India to pilot its straw management technique in the year 2016. The results were impressive. The district eliminated all stubble burning by the end of the first year. Farmers quickly understood the benefits when they stopped this practice – reduced pollution, increased yield, and new income generation through the sale of their straw to power plants for renewable energy.
The webisode contains insightful interviews with some of the farmers involved in the project. They explain the challenges that they had to overcome to adopt the straw management technique and share their hopes that others will follow their example. Following its initial success, the program has already been extended to an additional ten locations and a further eight locations are under evaluation.
The straw management technique pioneered here is testimony to how CNH Industrial stands with the world’s farmers, making agriculture more sustainable and profitable.
Watch here: bit.ly/BreakingNewGround_en
