It’s not all smiles for farmers on World Coconut Day!

It’s world coconut day on September 2 and the Coconut Development Board has lined up all sorts of celebrations in cultivation hotspots to mark the day.

However, farmer Selva Kannan in Pullavanchi village, Pattukottai Taluk, Thanjavur district looks far from happy, as he shows his 4-acre plantation of East Coast Talls to a group of agri science experts and tells them what ails his palms. His yield is low, too many butternuts are dropping off early, the leaves show signs of disease, there’s root wilt and heavy pest infestation.

Selva Kannan has just enrolled in FMCG company Marico’s farmer intervention programme – a project launched about a year ago by the maker of Parachute coconut oil, to boost productivity of this cash crop. As Saugata Gupta, MD and CEO of Marico says: “Through our multiple interactions with farmers, field visits, and data analysis, we observed significant farm-to-farm variations in productivity.”

Even as some farmers were getting nearly 150 nuts per palm, others were reporting barely 80. For Marico, an intervention was needed because its demand for copra has been clipping at 8 per cent per annum, while average supply in India has been inching up by just 2 per cent.

India produces 2,268 crore nuts annually, of which a significant per cent gets converted to copra. While copra volumes have still held steady, there has been an alarming output fall of 5 per cent in coconut production this year, largely due to pest infestation and unscientific crop management.

At SelvaKannan’s estate, it does not take long for the plant doctors from Marico to diagnose the problems and come up with a long list of solutions. Yellowing leaves show nitrogen deficiency, butternut falling down is due to boron deficiency, they advise the farmer. For the dangerous attacks by rhinoceros beetle and red weevil palm, they advise placing pheromones in a bucket filled with water – the insects will be attracted and drown in the water.

He is also advised on the right way to water the palms. At paddy belt Pattukottai, most farmers follow the same flood irrigation techniques on their coconut plantations as they do at their rice fields – a waste of precious resource.

Only a few farmers in the area practice intercropping, though they have been told to try growing cocoa. Some like C Karunanidhi, whose 6-acre farm borders Selva Kannan’s farm, have started poultry units – bird droppings are good manure for the palms.

So far, Marico has reached out to about 5,000 farmers through this intervention being piloted in Thanjavur district. Training programmes are held every other week and interested farmers can enrol.

To begin with, Professor Dhandapani from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University was roped in to conduct this. Now, Marico has hired a team of seven agri science graduates, whose task it is to visit the farms of enrolled members and start maintaining records of literally each palm on the estate.

Last month, the company started a WhatsApp group for enrolled farmers; they can simply post a picture of an affected palm and get queries answered. Through the group, they can also update themselves on price movements of coconut.

At Orathanadu, at the 15-acre plantation of farmer Kannathasan, results of Marico’s intervention are already showing. Each palm here is numbered. “The yield has gone up,” he beams, adding that weight of each coconut too has increased.

Buoyed by this initial success, Jitendra Mahajan, Chief Supply-Chain Officer, Marico, says the company will scale up the initiative across coconut-growing regions in India.

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