The Women’s Crop: Indian Women Look to Millet as the Climate Warms

After Kandakam Mogulamma’s husband, a farmer, passed away in 2019, she quickly learned how to grow crops. When Mogulamma began, her family was cultivating two varieties of millet in her home village of Potpalli, in the southern Indian state of Telangana. Her knowledge of the grain grew quickly and substantially, helping her cultivate more than enough on her two acres of land to feed her kids.

“Even if it rains for a couple of days, it is sufficient for my farm,” said the petite Mogulamma, 39, as she mixed cow urine, dung, and farm waste to prepare natural fertilizer.

Mogulamma has successfully cultivated 25 varieties of millet that have been thriving, even during droughts. Women like her are known as marginalized farmers, working very small bits of land. Still, while they’re called “marginal,” they make up the majority of farmers in India, along with other groups like the Dalits — known as “untouchables” — and tenant farmers.

Shailaja Fennell, a senior lecturer in the department of land economy at the University of Cambridge, said that because women mainly cultivate and manage millet production, “it could be deemed a woman’s crop.”

Climate change has forced a comeback

Different kinds of millets have been grown in India for 4,500 years. The country is the largest producer of the grains worldwide, commanding just over 40 percent of the global market share. As heirloom crops, they are loaded with nutrients, fiber, protein, and vitamins, and they help in tackling diabetes, obesity, and heart diseases. But there’s long been a stigma attached to millets — they’re considered by many to be a poor man’s meal.

Now, however, with growing environmental concerns like rising temperatures, deforestation, increased carbon emissions, air pollution, and biodiversity loss, millet production — which declined in the early 2000s — is making a comeback.

Also, India has been working to raise awareness about healthy eating. The UN General Assembly has declared 2023 as the “International Year of Millets.”India had previously requested UN to declare this in 2018, by making its case about the importance of millets to the farmer, consumer, and environment.

According to the Data Science Institute at Columbia University, millets were more resilient in the face of extreme weather than rice. India has seen a massive rise in greenhouse gas emissions over the past 30 years, and studies show that climate change will decrease agricultural productivity in future years.

India is the world’s second-largest producer of rice, wheat, and sugarcane. But climate change has made these crops unsustainable; sugarcane and rice need a lot of water and won’t grow in the ever-more intense heat.

“Normal crops like wheat, rice and barley can survive, whereas pearl and foxtail millets can sustain high temperatures,” said Palak Chaturvedi, a researcher at the University of Vienna who studies how crops are affected by environmental change.

“Millet generally adapts well to growing at shallow depths, and increases its root length to fetch water from belowground,” Chaturvedi said.

It also requires less water to complete its lifecycle than other crops, said Vilas A. Tonapi, director of the Indian Institute of Millet Research in Hyderabad, in Telangana. “This aspect makes millet a climate-resilient crop.”

Seeds in the hands of women

According to the 2015-2016 census, 73 percent of women in India practiced agriculture. Around 42 percent of farmers in India produced millets, and about 80 percent of them were women.

Dikhwetsou Wezah, a farmer in the northeastern state of Nagaland, grows 30 to 40 varieties of millet on her land. She shares the harvest with neighbors, and sells the rest.

Wezah turned to millet partly because she recognizes it as “an important food grain from our indigenous food systems,” and partly because she has to cope with the challenges wrought by the climate crisis.

“Millet-based farming is the answer to cope with the changing time,” she said.

Millet farming preserves biodiversity and empowers women farmers — they become more confident in their abilities and are then better able to address problems like poverty, malnutrition, and gender bias.

“Seeds should be in the hands of women,” said Begari Laxmamma, from Humnapur, Telangana. Laxmamma is known as the “seed keeper” by her fellow villagers because she maintains a seed bank.

“Men don’t know how to deal with seeds, save them, and preserve them,” she said.

Edikhweu Akami, another indigenous woman farmer from Nagaland, practices millet farming with techniques passed down to her by her grandparents.

“It brings memories of my younger days,” she said. “Nowadays I sow twice a year — March and July — which gives me nutritious food, and I sell it too.”

But while Akami is successfully producing and selling her grains, life is still difficult for women farmers like her.

Her hard work earns her only 2,000 to 3,000 thousand rupees, or $27 to $40, per month. That adds up to just $324 to $480 a year.