Krishna Prasad

Krishna Prasad is one of India's foremost conservers of native seeds and the founder of Sahaja Samrudha, the organic farmers' association he built in Karnataka. Across the state he is known simply as the "native seed man," a name earned over more than two decades of tracking down, saving and returning to farmers the traditional crop varieties that industrial agriculture had pushed to the edge of extinction.

His connection to Thailand is recent, and it grew out of bamboo. In July 2026 he travelled to Loong Choke's bamboo forest in Nakhon Ratchasima, the site that will host IPC16, the International Permaculture Convergence, in 2026. On that forty-acre farm more than a hundred species of bamboo are turned into houses, furniture, food and income, and he left calling it one of the clearest examples he had seen of a single crop sustaining a whole rural economy, and a model for the bamboo movement he is building at home.

He came to seed conservation by an unusual route. Trained as an environmental engineer, with an M.Tech in the subject, he joined the Green Foundation, one of the earliest Indian organisations working on seed conservation, and spent about twelve years there building farmer networks, seed banks and publications. By 2006 he was convinced that keeping seeds in a bank was not enough on its own. If traditional varieties were going to survive, farmers had to be able to grow them, eat them and sell them. He left to start Sahaja Samrudha, a name that means "bountiful nature."

The idea at its centre is a plain one: conservation lasts only when it pays. Rather than ask farmers to protect old varieties out of duty, he set about building the markets, the seed supply and the farmer-owned companies that would make growing them worthwhile. The network has since grown to thousands of organic farmers across twenty districts of Karnataka, together conserving more than eight hundred varieties of rice alone, along with millets, pulses, vegetables and cotton. Landraces that had almost disappeared, among them Rajamudi red rice and Black Burma, are grown, sold and cooked again, and some of the enterprises he helped set up, including India's first farmer-owned organic seed company, are now run by the growers themselves.

His work has been recognised well beyond farming circles. He is an Ashoka Fellow, and his writing on seeds and ecology has earned him the Karnataka government's award for best environmental journalist and the Srishti Samman from the Honey Bee Network. He remains, first and last, a communicator, as ready to tell a seed's story as to explain its agronomy.

Bamboo is his most recent cause. With fellow farmers he has started Bidiru Balaga, a collective reviving interest in the crop across Karnataka. The question he hears there is the one he spent years answering for seeds: if we grow it, who will buy it, and will it pay? His answer is the same, built on processing, value addition and steady markets rather than the sale of raw poles.

His philosophy is best put in his own words: "A farmer does not simply need a new crop. A farmer needs a new market, new skills, and a new economy built around that crop."