Can French farmers learn from Indian grassroots innovators?

Frederick and his wife are computer engineers in Paris, who were working with a company and earning well. One day, a question arose in their mind as to whether they could make a greater social and environmental impact than what they were doing. They left their computer job and moved to a village in Bologne region and rented an old house.

They restored it and started looking for farms to rent to do agriculture. During the search, one day, they found snails in their backyard. An idea came to Frederick's mind – could he take up snail farming as an activity in future? He proposed the idea to various farmers to rent their lands for this purpose but nobody believed that he could make much income from snail farming.

But for three years, he continued struggling, simultaneously pursuing experiments in his backyards. After waiting for long, he decided then to use his savings to buy a hectare of land for 10,000 euros.

He began to notice all the differences in different parts of the field. To prevent strong winds affecting the snails, he planted fruit trees on one side of the farm. To prevent grass from growing too much, he brought sheep to graze and keep the conditions for snails favourable. In the seasons when snails multiplied and the grass grew tall, he brought rabbits to cut it so that the sheep could graze later.

He found that up to 4 kg of meat per square meter could be produced. About 4,00,000 snails could be reared in one hectare. He hired some labourers to process it. He lived in very small rooms – one third and two third of his house was used as a lab for processing the snails and also for storage of snails during hibernation in winter.

Today, people who laughed at him earlier, marvel at his ingenuity and entrepreneurship. He is so much in demand that he can only meet 50 per cent of it from his farm and remaining 50 per cent he buys from other farmers whom he mentored for snail cultivation. A lot of farmers came to him for advice and he would share his knowledge without any hesitation and reservations. He also had some benches for children to come from nearby schools to learn about snail farming and their life cycles.

In his shop, where they sell the cooked snails, either in the natural shell or in the edible shells, he also displays the products developed by other young, green entrepreneurs. He has local juices, jams, herbal teas, special wines and other products. His belief is that every green entrepreneur must also share products of other small entrepreneurs to expand their market. He does not use chemicals, and neither does he preserve the snail meat. He follows nature and tries to work within the limits imposed by it.

He gives as much importance to his farm as production facility as an educational facility. Seeing his success, some farmers have given him small piece of land to cultivate snails in lieu of a privilege to partake as and when they meet. From a position of not being trusted and being the butt of a joke, he has now been elected as head of the village council and his judgements are trusted for the community well-being. He has two sons and a daughter and I was not surprised to see a book of yoga exercises used in his kindergarten.

I am yet to find a book on yoga for primary school children in many schools in our country. When he processed the fruits from his garden, he didn't have much use for the seeds except feeding them to the scavenging poultry birds. But when he saw the video of multipurpose fruit processing machine of Dharamveer Singh, he realised that he can get essential oils from the seeds and the remaining biomass can be fed to the birds.

Indian young farmers can learn the importance of in situ value addition, building their own testing and processing labs. The French farmers will not find small machinery to manage small farms or process small quantities for which Indian grassroots innovation can provide very useful alternatives.