Feature story - July 14, 2016
13 July 2016: Kedia, Jamui district, Bihar: Farmers in Kedia village are adopting ecological agricultural practices. It's a sustainable model and steadily being known as the "Kedia model".
Greenpeace has launched a crowdfunding model to help community build resilience against climate change and fluctuating market conditions, by donating towards a solar-powered cold storage unit (EcoFrost) and water harvesting structures. The call for donations is on the platform of Ketto, a third party crowdfunding website that enables projects like Kedia to connect India to issues at the heart of India.
Over 40% of farm produce gets wasted due to a lack of storage space in India. A majority of our farmers are small and marginal, who cannot afford storage or water harvesting structures, even with subsidies.
With a solar-powered cold storage system, Kedia farmers will be able to:
Extend the shelf life of their produce and cope with market-rate fluctuations. No more exploitative prices, no more rotting vegetables!
Receive higher returns on the ecologically produced food, adding to their financial security.
Save their own seeds (of crops like potato)
As a big plus, being a solar-powered unit dependent on clean energy, the cold storage will be a truly sustainable solution to Kedia’s storage crisis.
About the solar powered storage unit: Ecofrost Technologies Private Limited have designed a pioneering and innovative micro Cold Storage- a solar powered cold storage system Ecofrost, works at zero running cost as a solution to the wastage of agricultural produce in India. The product is developed at the Science and Technology entrepreneurship Park (STEP) of IIT-Kharagpur.
Kedia is embarking on an ecological agriculture revolution, information on the campaign and updates can be found here.