Upon the development of farm ponds, rejuvenation of lakes and betta land development, farmer’s interest, and ability to cultivate twice a year and an urge to expand agricultural activity gets boosted due to the water security achieved. PRAGATIMITRA North Canara FPC is working on catering harvesting and post-harvest processings of paddy and areca crops and providing input supply, labor support, processing, value addition, and marketing support to its members.

The farmers in the area of Sirsi and Siddapur taluks of Uttara Kannada district are facing typical issues like migration, shortage of workers, and the high cost involved in mechanizing the labor-intensive work as the implementation cost is too high for the individual farmer.

Currently, Pragati Mitra caters to around 1030 shareholder farmers and provides various service-based offerings in hub and spoke model. While harvesting of the areca nut happens at the farm gate, peeling of areca nuts harvested, boiling and many other post harvestings can be done at the doorstep of farmers and/or at the common facility center set up by FPC. This initiative is helping areca nut farmers not just to harvest their areca nut on the right time but also to get it processed in relatively lesser time and price and avail the best possible prices at the peak season. The overall offerings decrease the cost of cultivation and enhance the income with timely harvesting, processing, and value addition when purchasing prices of the commodity are high in the market. This also enables many interested farmers to sell only a part of processed and value-added areca nut and retain the rest of it to sell whenever the price is better than the peak season due to lack of supply of the commodity.