Bhavnaben: Seeing is Believing

As one of the SEWA sisters who participated in the first Train the Trainer programme, Bhavnaben was also one of the first to try Smart Farming in India. Previously, she used flood irrigation on her farmland, where she grows fennel, castor oil, and cotton. Like many other farmers in the area, Bhavnaben used an electricity-driven pump to withdraw water from a nearby well, which made her highly dependent on an unreliable electricity system. This meant that she often had to adapt to whenever electricity was available, which could very well be during erratic hours, such as in the middle of the night. She soon realized that she needed a way to irrigate her field more efficiently and sustainably.

When Bhavnaben first installed the Spowdi Smart Farming system, she divided her field into two zones of 500 sq.m. each. On one side, she used the Spowdi system to drip irrigate her crops, and on the other side, she continued with flood irrigation. That way, she would be able to see exactly how much the crops improved with the new irrigation practices.

The impact

When it was time for her first harvest, the results were clear. Smart Farming had enabled her crops to grow taller, but also faster. The number of days from sowing to harvest had gone from 214 days to 141 days on the Smart Farming side, saving her a lot of time.

When weighing the yield from her fennel production, the flood irrigation side had produced 106.5 kg of fennel, while the Smart Farming side provided her with a whopping 330 kg of fennel. This also generated a difference in Bhavnaben’s net earnings, as the Smart Farming side generated 71,350 rupees, a notable difference from the flood irrigation’s 21,728 rupees.

Below is a full comparison between Bhavnaben’s two zones, a true testament of ‘seeing is believing’. Read more about how Smart Farming has had an impact on Bhavnaben’s and other farmers’ livelihoods in our impact reports.