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The question sitting at the heart of Indian agriculture today is really about dependency. India imports the raw material for its most-used chemical fertilizer, relies on international price swings to decide what a farmer pays, and watches its farming economy absorb every geopolitical tremor from the Strait of Hormuz to the Black Sea. Meanwhile, the same farms that buy this imported nutrition generate enormous volumes of compost material, crop stubble, organic manure, and biodegradable waste every single season. The circle is there. The question is whether India has the will and the system to close it. 1

We have the raw material in abundance…

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India does not have a raw material problem. What it has is a conversion problem: the gap between organic waste sitting in a field or a goshala and an organic fertilizer that a farmer trusts enough to put on a kharif crop. The GOBARdhan scheme is attempting that bridge, offering ₹1,500 per metric tonne under its Market Development Assistance programme for organic fertiliser produced from biogas and CBG plants. As of March 2026, 120 plants had registered on the fertilizer management system. The infrastructure is moving. Slowly, but it is moving. (2)

The ball is in the farmers’ court –

Indian farmers do not buy a philosophy; they buy what works on their farms and crops, their soil, in the rain pattern that their district gets. Soil testing begins that process, because the same organic fertiliser does not behave the same way across a red laterite field in Karnataka and a black cotton soil in Vidarbha. 

Soil fertility is not a fixed concept; it is a variable graph across land masses, especially in the diverse Indian topography and climates. The government's own recommendation is integrated nutrient management, combining organic and inorganic sources, guided by soil-test results. That is less ideological and more practical than most of the debate around this subject. (3)

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The conventional chemical fertilizer economy will not simply step aside. In 2023-24, domestic urea production touched roughly 314 lakh metric tonnes. The fertiliser system in India has procurement networks, state subsidies, factory infrastructure, dealer relationships, and forty years of usage history behind it. An organic fertiliser company trying to make a place in that market has to earn it on terms the farmer recognises – reliability, consistency, cost-effectiveness, and visible results across multiple seasons. Goodwill is not enough. Ideology, even less so. What has to be better is the outcome in the field. (Press Information Bureau)

A Scale that already exists

India already has 17.11 lakh hectares under certified organic cultivation, with another 27.65 lakh in conversion, as of 2023-24 under NPOP. Madhya Pradesh alone accounts for 6.13 lakh hectares. Maharashtra sits at 2.67 lakh, Rajasthan at 2.15 lakh, and Gujarat at 92,334 hectares. These are not pilot plots. This is geography. (APEDA Organic)

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The real opportunity is not to create organic farming from scratch but to make organic inputs part of routine farm management wherever they fit. A farmer dealing with Gujarat monsoons and a farmer reading rainfall in Maharashtra are managing different moisture windows, soil textures, and crop calendars. What they share is the need for inputs that work with their conditions. Monsoon timing affects how manure breaks down; kharif cropping patterns affect what nutrient profile the soil is left with in October. Rainfall in India is not one thing, and a national organic fertiliser strategy has to hold that variety inside it, rather than pretend one approach covers every farmland across the nation. (4)

Listening to the Soil

Long-term ICAR trials have documented what good intuition already suggests: fields managed with integrated nutrient systems hold their soil biology better over time than those running purely on chemicals. Biology is the part of soil health that no amount of fertiliser bags can replace. The microbial communities, mycorrhizal networks, and organic carbon determine how much water fertile soil holds between rains. Water management in Indian agriculture is partly an irrigation question and partly a soil fertility question, because a field with good soil biology simply retains more of whatever water it receives. Ground water levels, recharge, drainage; all of it connects back to what is happening in the top six inches of earth. (5)

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Policy has begun to acknowledge that connection. PM-PRANAM lets states redirect 50% of fertiliser subsidy savings toward organic and natural farming and alternative fertilisers. The ₹1,500-per-tonne MDA for fermented organic manure, liquid fermented organic manure, and phosphate-rich organic manure is trying to build an actual commercial market for what GOBARdhan produces. India is not quite running an organic revolution yet, but it is building, in piecemeal fashion, the bones of a circular nutrient system. Waste, industry, farms, and soil health are slowly being put in the same sentence by the same policymakers. That has not always been true. (6)

The Farmer will have the Final Word

The last exam, as always, happens in the field. If an organic fertiliser is consistent, fairly priced, traceable to its composition, and suited to the crop a farmer is growing, it will find its way into the rotation. That is how any input earns loyalty – not through campaigns but through seasons. India has the raw material, the scientific institutions, the policy nudges, and millions of hectares already experimenting. What the organic fertiliser sector still needs to build is the supply chain reliability and the field-level evidence base that makes the next bag an obvious choice rather than a leap of faith. Farming has always rewarded patience and punished shortcuts. The soil remembers both. (APEDA Organic)

Bringing to the Mainstream

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Organic fertiliser going mainstream may not mean it replaces every synthetic input on every acre. It may simply mean that farmers have real, tested, affordable choices, and that fertile soil is treated as productive capital with a long lifespan rather than something to be mined one season at a time. That shift in thinking is what Farm Better points toward: not a product, but a way of measuring what a field is worth across twenty seasons, not just one. Indian agriculture does not need to pick a side. It needs to get better at asking what the soil actually needs, and then supplying it. (APEDA Organic)