This initiative has started as a pilot in Anantapuram district, a semi-arid region of Andhra Pradesh to demonstrate the concept of harnessing the water vapor from the atmosphere for crop growth. The pilot was successfully implemented and led to the concept of yearlong ground cover. Walter Jehne, a Climate Scientist, Microbiologist and founder of Healthy Soils Australia, has provided the conceptual understanding, knowledge and orientation during his visit to India in 2019 and helped APCNF farmers to scale up the implementation to 100 thousand farmers adopting this technology in Andhra Pradesh’s APCNF program.
Based on the success of Pre-Monsoon Dry Sowing, APCNF has initiated the concept of 365 days green cover in which a farmer is able to take three crops in a year, even in rainfed conditions in semi-arid areas. This represents a huge paradigm shift since in normal conditions farmers in rainfed situations can take only one crop and have to leave the land fallow for the rest of the year. With the Pre-Monsoon Dry Sowing concept, farmers even in semi-arid rainfed lands are now able to grow three crops in a year, with a lot of crop diversity and enhanced biodiversity in the croplands. In the last two years, farmers have come up with various innovations, crop combinations, crop diversifications based on their farming situations to maintain a 365 days green cover that will be shared in the webinar.