Ten youngsters take up traditional seeds and cultivation

By Niby Ann Mohan

THIS is an era where every youngster looks for a white collar job. But here we have 10 young people who researched on agriculture, realised the advantages of traditional seeds and turned to the soil and cultivation.

They are KP Ullas, from Kozhikode who preserves 'Thavalakannan,' a traditional seed of paddy; Lenish, basically a journalist who turned to traditional seed collection; Pratheesh who is cultivating about 40 traditional seeds; Deepak who is concentrating on terrace farming campaign; Santhosh from Kasargod; Shaiju; Lakshmi Narasimham; Dileep; Jyothish and Jose.

They are all in their 20s. Most of them are highly educated. They joined together from different organisations like Thanal, One Earth One Life, Jaiva Karshaka Samiti and Green Earth Association who are the innovators in traditional seeds conservation.

They tested both the hybrid and traditional seeds by cultivating them in a land and proved that traditional seeds will give high yields than the hybrid ones, without using any pesticide.

Kerala had about 4000 variety of seeds before 1946. After the establishment of universities and new technologies, hybridisation arrived, said KP Ullas. And we lost our traditional seeds. Now , Kerala has only 400 varieties of seeds and are on the verge of extinction.

This knowledge compelled them to propagate the idea of cultivating the traditional seeds without using any pesticides to the farmers. They organised a Traditional Seed Conservation Yathra for this purpose.