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.

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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.

A journalist’s return to an agrarian inheritance

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 Intensification (SRI), which he introduced to the Chengalpattu district after seeing it work in Odisha. Over time, reporting blended into experimentation.

“What I wrote, I tried out in my own fields,” he says. “Whatever knowledge I picked up, I practised it there. And whatever worked, I shared it with other farmers.”

Why native rice varieties began to vanish

Working at the grassroots, Prabu began focusing on indigenous paddy varieties that had been pushed aside by industrial agriculture.

Across Tamil Nadu, as in much of India, farming has grown dependent on a narrow set of high-yielding hybrid seeds. These varieties promise productivity, and they also demand higher inputs such as fertilisers, pesticides, and water. For many farmers, this translates into higher costs, increased vulnerability to pests, and greater exposure to climate stress.

Prabu had reported on this cycle for years. What disturbed him most was the parallel loss unfolding alongside it: native paddy varieties that had evolved over generations to suit local soils, rainfall patterns, and food cultures.

He wanted to bring those seeds back into farmers’ hands, and back into their fields. This intent took shape as the Green Cause Foundation, rooted in Morappakkam and built around farmers reclaiming their own seeds.

When a global research group backed a village effort

The foundation’s first major validation came through an unexpected ally. In 2017, Bioversity International, now the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, a scientific research organisation headquartered in Rome with an India office in Delhi, approached Prabu to collaborate.

“Usually, international agencies partner with state universities. This was the first time they approached us with two projects,” Prabu recalls.

The initial partnership, which ran from 2017 to 2019, focused on conserving and reviving native paddy varieties in Chengalpattu district. The objective was to establish community seed banks that conserved indigenous rice through active cultivation by farmers, rather than storage alone. Three seed banks were set up during this phase.

For Dr Jai Rana, Country Director for Bioversity in Asia, the decision followed a site visit.

“I was impressed by what they could deliver. M J Prabu had strong communication skills and deep trust within the community,” says Rana.

The project aligned with Bioversity’s aim of helping farmers use crop diversity to cope with climate stress and improve nutrition.

A second phase was conceptualised in 2019 to link farmers growing native paddy to local markets, ensuring economic viability alongside conservation. Funding limitations and the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted these plans. The programme was revived in 2023, drawing on earlier learnings and expanding in scale.

Seed banks built on trust, run by farmers

Today, Green Cause Foundation supports community seed banks across Chengalpattu district, all within Tamil Nadu. While there has been interest from farmers in neighbouring states such as Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, the initiative has not expanded beyond Tamil Nadu due to capacity constraints.

The model is simple and farmer-led. Seed banks are placed 12 to 22 kilometres apart to ensure accessibility across clusters. There is no fixed rule on village coverage, but one seed bank typically serves 180 to 210 farmers, translating to around six to seven villages, depending on seed availability and interest.

Farmers receive around two kilograms of indigenous paddy seeds to grow during the season. After harvest, they return four kilograms to the seed bank, ensuring it is replenished and remains farmer-owned.

It is a system built on trust.

The foundation is currently conserving 13 indigenous paddy varieties, including poongar (traditional rice variety), mappillai samba (traditional rice variety), karuppu kavuni(black rice variety), and seeraga samba (aromatic rice variety). These were once common in Tamil kitchens, and are now far less visible in fields.

Through the partnership with Bioversity, farmers receive technical support on seed selection, storage, and regeneration. Native varieties are evaluated under real farm conditions. Some are nutritionally profiled, opening pathways to stronger market recognition and long-term sustainability.

Over the last year, the initiative has worked with around 800 farmers across approximately 30 villages, and expanded to nine community seed banks across the district.

E Jagadeesan, who manages on-ground outreach and seed bank coordination, explains why farmers who have long relied on high-yielding hybrids are willing to return to older seeds.

“Traditional paddy seeds are resistant to disease and pests. Fertiliser use is low, and pesticide use is very low,” he says.

In a time of climate uncertainty, this resilience matters. Prabu has seen it in the fields.

“The crops are doing well despite heavy rains. They withstand floods,” he says.

For farmers like Arul Prakash from Tenpakkam village, the shift has been practical.

“We usually grow commercial paddy, but native varieties are important for long-term use,” he says. “The seeds we received from the seed bank are growing well. Because of water shortage, we cultivate paddy only once a year, but this seed bank is very useful.”

Others are rediscovering farming after long absences. Air Marshal Sukumar, a retired Indian Air Force officer, returned to his ancestral village in Chengalpattu district after four decades of service.

“I served in the Air Force for 40 years and came back to my village after retirement. I started organic farming here in 2012,” he says from Kayapakkam, where his family has lived for generations.

He received traditional Tamil Nadu paddy varieties through a local distribution supported by the seed bank initiative.

“They gave us three kilograms of seed and asked us to grow it and return a portion so the seed bank can grow. It’s the first season, but the crop is coming up well so far,” he adds.

Grain with memory, food with meaning

For Prabu, conserving seeds also means conserving a culture of food knowledge that once travelled through families and villages.

There is mappillai samba (traditional rice variety), believed to support vitality and aid recovery after surgery. There is sevapu gavani (red rice variety), a deep red rice once reserved for Chinese emperors, now valued for helping manage diabetes.

“These seeds are different from the rice most people are used to,” Prabu says. “Many of these varieties have medicinal value.”

This thinking draws from ideas long championed by Dr G Nammalvar, the late agricultural scientist and organic farming pioneer from Tamil Nadu, who spent decades urging farmers to return to natural practices rooted in local ecology. His work consistently highlighted the link between native crops, soil health, nutrition, and long-term farmer resilience.

It is this knowledge that the foundation is helping bring back into fields and kitchens.

‘The farmer must become a marketer’

If there is one lesson Prabu returns to, shaped by years of reporting on market failures, it is that farmers need control over how their produce is sold.

“It is your own baby, right? Why do you expect somebody else to come and name your baby?” he asks.

He often speaks about building direct, human relationships, such as a family farmer supplying a local gated community. To support this, he has grouped farmers on WhatsApp to share harvest updates and connect directly with buyers looking for specific organic, native rice.

This focus on markets also sits at the centre of Bioversity’s approach.

“Unless the community seed bank is linked to a viable business model, its sustainability will not continue after the project ends,” says Dr Rana.

Their work includes studying the nutritional value of these grains, supporting farmer-led branding, and building market links that help farmers earn better prices.

A second wind after the pandemic pause

The work slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and regained momentum in 2023 with the revived phase of the Bioversity collaboration.

Today, Green Cause Foundation’s effort reflects a convergence of strengths: a journalist’s accumulated learning, scientific support shaped for the ground, and community trust earned season by season.

The seed banks Prabu helped build are living systems. They refill each harvest through farmers who choose to grow, save, and return what they harvest.

In landscapes shaped by commercial seed markets and chemical-intensive farming, his work offers a radical reminder. Resilience often begins with local memory.

And sometimes, the most powerful stories are not written. They take root in soil, carried forward by hands that decide to sow.

All images from M J Prabu.