This Former Journalist Is Helping 800 Farmers Grow 13 Native Rice Varieties Across TN Villages |
For more than two decades, M J Prabu criss-crossed India, listening to farmers and filing their truths from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. As The Hindu’s agriculture correspondent, he carried forward a farming column with a nearly 70-year legacy, written from the newspaper’s Chennai headquarters.
Over the years, he began to notice a pattern that stayed with him long after each dateline changed. The land was speaking. The seeds were changing. The costs were rising. And in many places, the fields were slowly giving way to concrete.
Then, after years on the road, Prabu felt the need for a new challenge.
“Whatever work you do should challenge you,” he says. “When it becomes monotonous, and when you are no longer getting the recognition you seek, you have to move on and take on something bigger and more demanding.”
That decision did not take him to another newsroom. It took him home.
Back in Morappakkam, his native village in Tamil Nadu’s Chengalpattu district, about 90 kilometres from Chennai International Airport, Prabu saw something he could no longer ignore.
“While driving from the airport, you cannot see any fields on the way,” he says. “It’s only in my village that the fields are still intact. Everywhere else, it has become concrete.”
Surrounded by farmlands his ancestors once cultivated, Prabu founded the Green Cause Foundation in 2014, while he was still working at The Hindu. He describes its beginnings as “just a spark of an idea”, not a grand plan.
“I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing,” he admits. “All my life, people have known me only as a journalist. And I thought, what better thing than starting something in my native village, in my ancestral place?”Prabu founded the Green Cause Foundation in 2014, while he was still working at The Hindu.
In 2015, Prabu left The Hindu and returned to Morappakkam to focus full-time on farming initiatives. Today, at 52, his life is rooted firmly in the fields he once wrote about from afar.
Prabu is clear about one thing. His shift from journalism to grassroots work follows the same thread.
“I am not into agriculture just because I was an agriculture journalist,” he says. “I come from an agrarian family. The fields where I work belong to my ancestors.”
His father, a medical professional, spent his life treating farmers, particularly those living with diabetes, while also tending to the family’s land. That closeness to both health and farming shaped Prabu’s understanding of food and the long-term consequences of chemical-intensive agriculture, well before these conversations entered the mainstream.
During his reporting years, Prabu carried ideas back to Morappakkam like field notes meant for practice.
“Wherever I went, I was picking up new technologies and new methods used by farmers,” he says. “I used to bring them back home and try them in my fields.”
One such intervention was the System of Rice........