It is a well-known fact that the use of organic or biological inputs has assumed importance in the promotion of organic agriculture.  In conventional agriculture where the application of chemical inputs is widely known for its direct action to feed and protect the crop,on the contrary, in organic agriculture, inputs are being used to feed the soil and to create an environment to keep the pests below the economical threshold limit (ETL).  In this effort, there are two crucial issues for farmers who are in the mindset of transitioning to organic.  One is the availability of organic inputs and the other one is the quality of the product.

In recent years,few innovative entrepreneurial farmers have made attempts to adopt appropriate production methodologies to produce quality bio-products and have made them available to other farmers at reasonable prices.  They took advantage of the growing awareness of organic agriculture among farmers.Various types of organic and biological inputs are being launched and sold to farmers.Sebastian is one such farmer entrepreneur who has been successfully producing organic inputs, serving as a role model to others in the region.

Sebastian is a small farmer from Mugavanur Village in Vaiyampatti block of Trichy district, Tamil Nadu. He owns four and a half acres of agricultural land in which two and half acres are under rainfed condition.  He irrigates 2 acres from well and borewell sources.With cyclic years of drought for more than a decade, cultivation of crops has always been a challenge for him. Hence, he limited the cultivation of high-water intensive crops like paddy and has moved to cultivation of creepers like ridge gourd, snake gourd, bottle gourd. In the shade of these creepers, he cultivates tomato, innovatively. This has been recognized as one of the effective grassroots level innovations and included in the Clima-adapt program of Norway and TNAU in the year 2012.