Giving Compass' Take:
- Food Tank highlights the nonprofit Kheyti, which has designed an affordable greenhouse that allows farmers to grow seven times the amount of food using less water to stabilize incomes and build climate resilience.
- According to this article, the financing model may also help to address some of the financial challenges smallholder farmers can face. How can donors step in and help?
- Learn more about fighting climate change through agricultural methods.
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In a farming region outside of Hyderabad, India, the nonprofit Kheyti is using a “Greenhouse-in-a-box” solution to build climate resilience and income stability among India’s smallholder farmers.
Founded in 2015, the organization’s founders spent thousands of hours speaking to Indian farmers to understand the issues they faced. “When we bucket [the problems],” explains Sathya Raghu Mokkapati, one of Kheyti’s co-founders to Food Tank, “there are two broad challenges: climate-based risks like heat, rain, [and] pests, and… distribution based risks like poor linkages to inputs, finance, knowledge, and markets.”
Kheyti’s greenhouse program aims to target both issues. “We did many experiments in open field farming to get stable yield and income but we failed because of many external factors like pests and diseases,” explains Mokkapati to Food Tank. This led Kheyti to focus their efforts on making greenhouse agriculture accessible to smallholder farmers.
Read the full article on Kheyti by Thea Walmsley at Food Tank.