There is a version of this article that would tell you our grain comes from a single smallholder family in a village whose name you would remember, photographed at sunrise. It would be lovely writing and it would not be accurate.
Here is the real version, which is less picturesque and more useful.
How millets are actually farmed
Millets in Tamil Nadu are largely grown by small and marginal farmers on rain-fed land — the land without assured irrigation. That is not incidental. It is the entire reason these crops persisted: they are what you grow when you cannot count on water.
Millets need substantially less water than rice, wheat or sugarcane, commonly cited at around 70 per cent less. They tolerate poor soil, mature quickly, and withstand the kind of erratic rainfall that has become normal. For a farmer without a reliable borewell, a millet crop is often the difference between a harvest and no harvest.
The difficulty has never been growing them. It has been selling them.
The real problem: the market, not the crop
For decades millets were caught in a loop. Procurement and the public distribution system favoured rice and wheat. Consumers came to see millets as poor people's food. Prices stayed low, so farmers shifted to rice where they could, so volumes fell, so processing infrastructure disappeared, so millets became harder to buy, so demand fell further.
They are also genuinely harder to process. Several have a tough husk requiring dehulling equipment that does not exist in many places now that village-scale milling has closed. A farmer can grow varagu perfectly well and still have nowhere within reach to get it processed.
That is why the recent attention matters more than it might seem. The UN declared 2023 the International Year of Millets on a proposal led by India — which grows roughly a fifth of the world's supply — and the resulting investment addresses the bottleneck rather than the crop.
What we can honestly say about our sourcing
We buy the great majority of our grain and pulses from within Tamil Nadu, through local suppliers and aggregators near Dindigul. We are a small buyer. We are not in a position to claim a direct contract with every farmer whose grain reaches us, and we will not imply one.
What we can say:
- Sourcing is local and regional, not imported.
- We buy consistently rather than opportunistically, which is worth more to a supplier than a good price paid once.
- We reject material that does not meet our standard, and would rather go out of stock than take a batch we are unhappy with.
We would like to move to more direct farmer relationships as we grow. We have not done it yet. Saying so now seems better than announcing it later as though it had always been true.
What your purchase actually does
Not as much as a marketing page would tell you, and not nothing.
Sustained demand for millets makes rain-fed farming a more viable choice for people whose alternative is a water-hungry crop on land that cannot support one. It supports the processing infrastructure those farmers need in order to sell at all. And because these crops need so much less irrigation, more millet in the food system genuinely means less pressure on groundwater in a state that cannot afford any more.
That is a slow, structural, unglamorous effect. It is also the real one. Every millet laddu and porridge mix we make sits on top of it.
Sources: FAO, International Year of Millets 2023; published reviews of millet production and water use.
