by Mudar Patherya
From knowing zilch about crops, Zainab Husain is now one of Jalgaon and Barwani’s most prosperous farmers.
To find a Dawoodi Bohra agriculturist in the interiors of Madhya Pradesh is not everyday. But that’s not the only reason 33-year-old Zainab Husain merits a story. One of Barwani district’s most prosperous farmers today, Husain inherited her father, Sabir Husain’s 52-acre farm and pesticide and fertiliser business more as liability.
His sudden demise when she was 27, left her, his only child, in charge of the land that yielded cotton, chillies, wheat and bananas. Running the agro-products business was the true challenge, Husain realised, when she discovered that farmers owed her late father Rs 90 lakh.
To sell out, and get her married is the most practical solution, suggested her father’s family. Husain, a post-graduate in chemical science, hadn’t dirtied her hands in the fields.
Neither had she dabbled in business or chased debtors. Based in Jalgaon, a seven-hour drive from Mumbai, Husain had moved there as a child to live with her grandparents since the industrialised city offered the bright student better schooling prospects.
The farm was a good 210 kms from her home, and the family wasn’t moneyed (“We took a Rs 10,000 loan from the jamaat so that we could treat my father in Mumbai,” she says). How would she manage the farm via remote control or dare to sit months at the Barwani trading store? Just when the sale looked most feasible, a contrarian spoke up. Husain herself.
The extended family threw a fit, and just like it sometimes happens, an unlikely game-changer appeared on the scene. It was the goodwill her father had garnered over the years.
“When farmers or farm hands were in trouble,” says Husain, “he’d quietly help them with agrochemical supplies against long credit which they’d repay during the following harvest.
If they needed health assistance, my father would fund the treatment.” When Husain turned up at her store to ferret the list of debtors, she found unlikely allies. “They accompanied me from home to home, farm to farm, requesting the debtors to pay up.”
Sixty per cent of the outstanding was recovered; the family could breathe again. The early months were gruelling — negotiating the eight-hour Jalgaon-Barwani circuit while changing four bus routes; spending three months on the trot in unknown territory; communicating with 50 farm hands to enhance her insight into costing, irrigation potential and cropping patterns, and imploring the general manager of a lending bank in Mumbai to defer instalments. For someone who has been a farmer six years, Husain has a fair report.
Her cotton yields have trebled to 25 quintals per acre, she has more than doubled farm revenues, got into a positive capex cycle with tractor purchase and has plans to set up a back-ended nursery. Success gave her enough confidence to dabble in construction, building bungalows and apartments in Jalgaon. “The construction business provided us advances and perennial revenues, which we could use to fund the seasonal business of agriculture,” she says.
Over the last year, she has ploughed surplus funds into organic manure manufacture (100 tonnes per month, which has proved profitable from year one), forayed into the business of writing education support software, and is widening the construction portfolio to commercial properties.
And, she won’t stop learning. The soft-spoken lady, who could be a small time case study, is pursuing a PhD in agricultural extension.
source: http://www.punemirror.com / Pune Mirror / Home> Others>Sunday Read / May 25th, 2014