Sahaja Samrudha

Sahaja Samrudha is an organic farmers' association based in Karnataka, India, whose name means "bountiful nature." It began in 2001 as a small network of farmers exchanging seeds, ideas and knowledge about growing food without chemicals, and grew, under its founder Krishna Prasad, into one of the country's most influential organisations for the conservation of native seeds.

The organisation works from a single conviction: that India's traditional crop varieties are worth saving, and that the surest way to save them is to make them worth growing. Where much conservation work stops at the seed bank, Sahaja Samrudha follows the seed all the way to the market. It helps farmers multiply and certify traditional seed, connects them to buyers who will pay a fair price for organic and heirloom produce, and has helped set up farmer-owned enterprises, including what is described as India's first farmer-owned organic seed company, so that the value of the harvest stays with the people who grow it.

The scale of the work is considerable. The network now reaches around fifteen thousand organic farmers across twenty districts of Karnataka, cultivating close to thirty-seven thousand acres between them. Some six thousand of these farmers are active seed savers and breeders. Together they conserve more than eight hundred varieties of rice, along with scores of millets, wheats, cottons, pulses and eggplants, and well over a hundred vegetables. Rice landraces that had nearly vanished, such as Rajamudi red rice, Diana and Black Burma, are grown and sold again through the organisation's efforts.

Alongside the fieldwork, Sahaja Samrudha runs the quieter activity that keeps a farming movement alive. It carries out participatory research with farmers rather than on them, supports organic certification, documents traditional knowledge before it is lost, and campaigns on seed and farming policy. Over the years it has drawn together a wide network of other non-profits, farmer groups, research institutions, schools and journalists, and its work has been recognised with honours including the Jaivik India award for the country's best farmer producer organisation and a special mention in the India Biodiversity Awards.

The organisation also built its own route to the city. Through Sahaja Organics, its marketing arm, and the Sahaja Seeds brand, traditional rice, millets, pulses and vegetables reach urban households that would otherwise never encounter them, closing the distance between the farmer who conserves a variety and the family that eats it.

For all its growth, Sahaja Samrudha has kept the same starting point it had in 2001: the farmer, and the seed in the farmer's hand. Its founder describes conservation not as a museum exercise but as a living economy, one in which a farmer is given a new market, new skills and a new reason to keep an old variety growing.

That work now reaches to Thailand through its founder. In July 2026 Krishna Prasad visited the bamboo forest in Nakhon Ratchasima that will host IPC16, the International Permaculture Convergence, in 2026, and Sahaja Samrudha stands among the supporters of the movement the convergence brings together. The seed-to-market model it has built in Karnataka speaks directly to what that gathering will explore: how to keep traditional crops, and the farmers who grow them, economically alive.

Community seed banks and seed multiplication, participatory crop research and organic certification support, farmer producer companies and organic marketing through Sahaja Organics and Sahaja Seeds, and advocacy and training in traditional and organic farming.