Our Plans for 2023

MANY MANY THANKS TO THOSE WHO DONATED & SUPPORTED!

THANKS TO YOU WE WILL BE ABLE TO DO MUCH MORE!

We will certainly be reporting and letting you know the benefits of your donations!

Please stay engaged. Special outreach events will occur in June (Worl Environment Day), October and then the "Power of Giving" event in November.

We start by thanking our donors, supporters, advisors and those active on the ground in Punjab. For those of you who donated in 2021 and 2022 and especially those who donated via Dasvandh Network in November 2022, we thank you from the bottom of our heart. The success of the November 2022 fundraising on Dasvandh Network for Pagri was due to the matching funds arranged by Dasvandh and because many of you responded to appeals by our president and others. Thanks for giving us the resources to be effective in 2023! We will keep reporting on our progress, and the extent to which we are helping Punjab’s farmers.

Background

Early in 2021, we registered as a nonprofit organization in the state of Illinois, USA, with Lal Singh as president, Kuldeep Singh Sra as treasurer, and Harinder Singh Lamba as secretary. Since then, thanks to the contacts developed by our president, we have developed extensive contacts in Punjab and a network of supporters in the US and Canada. In 2022, we used this information to launch two projects in Punjab that we describe briefly below.

Pagri’s mission is to help transform the agriculture of Punjab to one that is better environmentally and economically, to help its farmers (especially small farmers) increase their incomes, to help consumers get clean and healthy nutritious food, and then to help with all the post-harvest methods from storage to food processing.

Important News!

Our president, Lal Singh, visited Punjab recently, solidified relationships, held meetings in a couple of places and got feedback on how best to proceed. It also became clear that Pagri should be at the table in convincing the new Punjab government to change policies to help transform agriculture and to benefit farmers. We will be engaging in this process.

Our Plans for 2023

1.     Expanding Current Projects
a.     Extension for Better Agricultural Practices – Leader, Gurbinder Bajwa
This project provides a much-needed extension activity to guide farmers on lower cost agriculture, environmentally friendly practices and (chemical) residual free crops. An example is to use the direct seeding of rice (DSR) that uses much less water and then mulches the straw (instead of burning it), and then plants the wheat seeds among the mulch without tillage – savings all around in water, fertilizer, diesel fuel, and pesticides and herbicides – all expensive inputs. This project will help in those areas that are favorable for high value basmati rice, while helping all other areas of Punjab transition out of rice.
b.    Educating Farmers for Organic Farming – Leader, Balwinder Singh
Here we are working to identify and support willing farmers who will implement new lower cost organic farming type practices, so that these farmer’s fields can act as demonstration sites and motivate other farmers to change their practices from the current wheat-rice monocultures. The objective here is to create a revolution among small farmers through actual ground level action. This also needs a parallel activity to convince consumers of the higher value of organic produce, so that they are willing to pay more for it (as now happens in the US).
2.    Addition of Project for Integrated Farming – Leader, Dr. Rachhpal Bajwa
This project will be added to Pagri projects and will be posted on Dasvandh Network and the Pagri website. We are looking for good ways to implement this project activity and emphasis. The benefit of such an approach is that it helps farmer incomes on small areas of land by adding, say, poultry, dairy and fodder crops, with use of manure as fertilizer.
3.    Addition of Project for Food Processing
Through bad agricultural policies, Punjab lags way behind Haryana in food processing, which is a high value-added post-harvest activity that also helps mop up surpluses that depress prices. With the advice of above project leaders or food processing experts such as Harpreet Singh Bhatti and Puneet Singh Thind, and our project leaders, we will attempt to define how a small activity can be started here.
4.     Information Technology Tasks
This will aim at revamping the Pagri website to act as decisive center for disseminating information (education, news, project activities, articles, videos, feedback, etc.) and encouraging interactions. After completing that we will be establishing pages for Pagri on FaceBook and YouTube so as to have a dynamic presence of Pagri on social media. All future newsletters will also be published on the Blog page of our website.
5.    Online Marketing
Online technology development will be looked at through the development of, say, a Farmer to Consumer App (so consumers can contact area farmers and by directly) – take this App and have it beta tested and then rolled out. Another activity that has been conceived is to provide online advice on FPOs (Food Processing Organizations) to farmers from experts and for farmers to communicate amongst themselves and use it as an organizing tool.

Others who will be providing core support in Pagri are:

Birender Singh
Manny Singh – Strategic Adviser
Sheena Sawhney – Outreach and host of online events

We look forward to your increasing support in 2023 so that we can implement our expanded activities and do even more.

We will certainly be reporting and letting you know the benefits of your donations!

Harinder Lamba
Secretary, Pagri