The Akshata family consists of 200 Farmers divided into clusters representing hundreds of acres of fertile paddy land. Akshata works directly with the farmer providing them the seeds, compost organic fertilizer, technical know-how on sustainable farming and the use of alternatives to hazardous chemicals while purchasing the paddy at three times the price of the normal hybrid varieties of rice.
this brought prosperity to many of our clusters but still so many live on less than 2 dollars a day.
akshata Green force 4 cluster from the north of sri lanka consists of our most poorest farmers who were severely affected by the war and still have not been able to lift their heads ups, they lost their kith and kin, lost their herds of cattle when moving from place to place to escape the terror, lost their lands and lost their shelter but fortunately not their spirit, they live to fight a another day for a better tomorrow.
we at Akshata intend to see them through this difficult times by gradually providing them everything they need, our goal is their prosperity which we are confident we can provide with your help by purchasing their produce.
below our some of our farmers views;
- Joseph Anthoy – farming since the age of 15 and still in poverty, even a simply cutting machine has to be hired with mill owners making all the profits
- Alahakoon – brother was killed, moved from place to place and can’t even afford to buy seeds for farming
- Kathrivel – with all my troubled I still use neem seeds to fed off weed and stay away from chemicals although many companies have tried to force it on us to make money from us promising to give us rice seeds and trying to make us dependent.
- Tharagadas – farming is all i know since childhood
- sivai mariam pillai -we have 5 water tanks we used to use buffalo to plough the fields which was one in nature and didn’t hurt the soil, but due to the war we lost everything don’t have a single buffalo or cow, at-least Akshata provides us with organic fertilizer which is great but we still have to higher tractors at a tremendous cost
