In the dead of night during the summer of 2018, organic farmer S Jayalakshmi would walk into her four-acre farm to water her trees.

She had no one but her trusty guard dog Tinku for company. “There was no rain that year and I watered my crops at night because the soil wouldn’t absorb much then; during the day, it would be so hot that water would evaporate,” she recalls on a windy day at her farm in Velanthavalam on the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border. A staff nurse at ESI Hospital, Coimbatore, Jayalakshmi single-handedly nurtures the farm in which she grows coconuts, pepper, nutmeg, and fruits such as figs, jackfruit, and custard apple.

The 53-year-old bought the land in 2007. “I inherited some money when we sold my father’s property,” she recalls. “I decided to invest it on a patch of land; I’ve always wanted to do farming since my father was a farmer,” she says. But Jayalakshmi needed a lot more money. With no support from her husband, she borrowed some, and for the rest, pawned her jewellery.

As a farmer, Jayalakshmi’s problems are no different from that of her male counterparts. But she does bring in something extra: her farm is well-equipped with a modest tile-roofed room, a kitchen, and clean toilets. The mother of two ensures that her farm hands — a majority of them women — work in a comfortable environment. She’s the boss here, and once at home, she smoothly switches roles.

“I ride to the farm on my scooter for an hour after my morning shift; get work done here, and leave in time for the evening shift,” she explains.

D Birundha, who’s a Hardware Engineer in Bengaluru, also travels every month to her organic farm in Kovilpatti. “I do a lot of remote management, but I also have to physically be there sometimes.” Birundha grows native bottle gourd, ridge gourd, and pumpkin, which she retails in Bengaluru.

The 40-year-old says that for her, the going has been smooth. “I sometimes feel that male farm hands are hesitant to take my orders,” she says. “But that’s more to do with them assuming that they are better experienced in this field than me, rather than the fact that I’m a woman,” she adds.

Birundha says she feels that more and more women are running their own farms these days. “In a WhatsApp group of 200 organic farmers that I’m part of, 25 are women,” she points out.

Without land rights

But for a small farmer or a labourer who spends hours toiling on land she doesn’t own, the story is completely different. Most of what the former does is unpaid work, much like a homemaker’s. S Alageswari, who has been setting-up organic kitchen gardens for homes and educational institutions across Tamil Nadu for 10 years. “Women farmers end up doing more work. They are involved in every step, right from ploughing, sowing, watering, weeding, and harvesting, and are paid lesser when compared to men,” she says.

A lot of them don’t have land titles, unless they were privileged enough to buy it themselves, according to Alageswari. “It is rare to find land ownership shared between the husband and wife, despite her putting in equal, and sometimes, even more work,” she adds. And once she is done with farm-related work, she has a whole new set of chores to be done at home.

R Sujatha, who owns agricultural land on the Puducherry-Villupuram road, says there has to be a “holistic solution” to this gender imbalance in farming. “There is no fixed way of creating a balance,” she feels for, “Farmer-related issues are unique to every region.”

Coimbatore-based Shanthni Balu, a natural farming consultant, says that while the Government offers special subsidies for women farmers, the fact that a lot of them do not have land titles, poses problems. But that doesn’t change anything for a woman farmer. She wakes up long before dawn and heads out to work, packing food, and sometimes, her baby in tow, whom she will put to sleep in a thottil tied to a tree near her workplace.