Thank you for taking the time to know about the food you eat.
We absolutely love it when you are as passionate and as curious as we are about who grows our food, how it is grown, stored and processed (almost all food is food processed; it is the degree to which it has been that matters), and the extent to which it is tested.
We cannot wait to tell you about the hands that grow our food and the journey that this food undertakes to reach you.
Jump in!
So, who grew the food in the packet you are holding?
Collectives of women farmers with tiny pieces of land and big hearts. They co-create life-affirming farming practices with experts to suit their unique soil and climatic conditions.
They walk long distances to gather the ingredients (garlic, chili, neem, among other very specific leaves) required to make bio-inputs that ward-off (not kill!) insects that feed on crops.
Making these inputs is laborious too: think grinding, boiling, fermenting, filtering before finally, spraying.
Why do they do so?
Why do our farmers go the extra mile (literally!) when they can easily purchase a bottle of Dawa —yes, that’s what input retailers call synthetic pesticides!
Because our farmers are keen environmentalists, economists, and mothers.
They recognize pesticides for what they are: easy fixes which do more harm than good.
From not knowing when and how much of these toxins to apply, inhaling them accidentally while spraying (due to wind) to the very real debts that they must repay, our farmers know the damage that pesticides do to their lands, homes, and hearths.
Now they are imagining and implementing a life-affirming way in which to grow food.
And by purchasing the food they grow, you are helping script this very real change in rural India.
What do they get?
Our women farmers, many of whom are Adivasis (indigenous people) are based deep in rural India and never had access to formal markets.
They bought costly inputs from the same trader to whom they were forced to sell their prices for dirt cheap prices.
This phenomenon is what economists call the interlocking of markets.
When you buy our food, you help our women farmers get fair prices for the produce at their doorstep.
This is a very big deal because most of the farmers we work with are very far from Mandis (where relatively fair prices are set and government procurement sometimes happens) and therefore do not even know, let alone get, the going prices.
What happens to the food after it leaves the farm?
Growing food without pesticides is hard. Ensuring that it remains toxin-free till it reaches you is harder. We transport, mill (minimally), and store our food separately so it doesn’t get mixed up and contaminated at any step. We use cocoons—giant bags in which bags of produce are stacked and flushed with Carbon Dioxide—to remove any trace pests which may have crept in. Our experienced women workers, some who have been with us for a decade, pick, clean, and pack the produce so it reaches you as carefully as it was grown.
How do you know that our food is genuinely pesticide-free?
We take great pride in our deep relationships with our collectives who track what happens on the farms day after day, season after season to see to it that synthetic pesticides are never used.
They keep exhaustive (and exhausting!) lists of approved women farmers, the bio-inputs they apply, and even their attendance in community meetings.
But we do not ask you to just take our pestcide-free promise at face value; especially in today’s day and age when claims are thrown around loosely to confound.
Our promise is simple.
We bring you nutritious, minimally processed food, every batch of which is tested for 230+ pesticide compounds in third party labs.
That’s all.
If you have come this far…we have one more thing to tell you.
We are a company born out of collective action. Eight women farmer collectives came together to form us, Safe Harvest.
Today we partner with thirty.
Our collectives also work on water conservation, nutrition, literacy and entrepreneurship (some of our women farmers now make and profitably sell bio-inputs!) in deep rural India.
So every rupee you spend to buy our food has powerful, lasting positive ripple effects.
And thank you from the bottom of our hearts for this!