Reimagining Tribal Livelihoods

Launched in 2015 in the Satpura forests of central India, Social Farm was an experimental effort to address how small and marginal tribal farmers are structurally excluded from agricultural markets. Working with the Korku community, the project combined collective farming with pre-arranged contract buyers, enabling farmers to grow, aggregate, transport, and sell crops together rather than in isolation.

The initiative prioritised farmer agency and market access over external control, demonstrating how collective systems can outperform individual survival strategies—while also revealing the limits of livelihood models that do not fully account for climate risk.

What it achieved—and taught: Enabled the collective sale of over 1 million kilograms of onions, increasing incomes by 30%+. The project was later shelved after a climate-induced crop failure, offering a formative lesson in resilience, risk, and why rural systems must be designed for uncertainty—not just efficiency.