The Farmer Who Kept Losing Money

Rajendran had been farming paddy for nearly thirty-two years. People in his village often joked that he knew the soil better than he knew people. His fields lay about a kilometre away from his house in Palakkad, a stretch he had walked thousands of times across seasons—blazing summers, heavy monsoons, and everything in between.

But the last few years had begun to trouble him in ways he hadn’t expected. Four consecutive harvests had brought losses, not profits. Not massive losses, but the slow, painful kind that ate away at savings and confidence. Once or twice, he dismissed it as “climate change,” something he’d heard on television. But the pattern kept repeating.

This year, the trouble began early. One morning, Rajendran walked to the field and found the water level unexpectedly low. He was puzzled—it had rained the previous night. The soil felt dry in patches, almost cracked. He looked around to see if the canal had clogged again, but everything looked normal. He shrugged it off and flooded the field manually. That evening, his ankle began to hurt again, a sharp reminder that the walk to the fields was getting harder.

A week later, he noticed pale yellow spots on the tender leaves. A pest, perhaps. But he wasn’t sure which one. By the time he showed the leaves to the agriculture officer during his next visit, the officer said the infection had already spread. “You should have informed me earlier, Rajendran,” he said kindly. “How, sir? You only come once in two weeks,” Rajendran replied, embarrassed.

The officer scribbled notes in his register, promised to send someone from the Krishi Bhavan, and left. No one came.

Then came the weather problem. Unexpected heat waves, sudden rain, long dry spells—none of the patterns Rajendran had known his whole life seemed reliable anymore. The weather forecast on television hardly matched what happened in his small village. The nearby stations recorded humidity and rainfall, but his fields existed in their own microclimate, unpredictable and unforgiving.

His wife noticed the change in him. He had become quieter, more withdrawn. He ate less and spent more time staring at the field map he had drawn by hand, as if he was trying to find answers in the creases of the paper. “What is worrying you so much?” she asked one evening. He simply replied, “I don’t understand my own land anymore.”

One night, his son, a commerce graduate working in a small firm in Coimbatore, said casually, “Appa, we should stop this. Farming is not worth the stress. Why don’t we give the land on lease?” The words hit him harder than the losses. He had always hoped his son wouldn’t leave farming behind completely, but he didn’t blame him—the boy had only seen farming as struggle, not pride.

The turning point came when the local cooperative society called him to discuss loan settlements. “Rajetta, don’t take this personally,” the officer said, “but many farmers like you are struggling. We’re trying to understand what’s happening.”

For the first time, it dawned on Rajendran that he wasn’t alone. Several others around him were facing similar issues—unpredictable moisture levels, delayed pest detection, lack of timely information, inability to be physically present at the fields daily, and no system to alert them before something went wrong.

Everyone was fighting their battles separately, with no shared data, no collective monitoring, no alerts, and no structured support system. The agriculture officers were stretched thin, visiting twenty or more farms in a single week. Farmers relied on instinct, luck, and outdated schedules. Nothing connected them, and so everything kept slipping through their fingers.

One evening, as he sat looking at his field—still beautiful, still full of potential—Rajendran whispered to himself, “How do I take care of something I cannot see every day? How do I know before the damage happens, not after?”

He was not asking for miracles. He was asking for information—timely, accurate, simple information that could help him act at the right time.

And somewhere, hidden under the weight of his worries, lay a much bigger question: “Is there a way for someone like me to farm smarter, even if I cannot be at the field every day? Is there a way to stop money from slipping away before I can save it?”

That is the mystery waiting to be solved.