Dear Reader,

I dislike Women’s Day, just like I do Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day. Come 8 March, I wait with trepidation for the saccharine WhatsApp forwards about how accommodating women are, just how much we take on, our resilience. And of course there are the buy-one-get-one makeup offers because ‘I deserve to feel beautiful’, and the relentless messaging on how I can, in fact, have it all. 

This Women’s Day, and for months leading up to it, I have been thinking about women and their many labours, how they intersect with food systems and how they keep them alive. As a team made up largely of women (over 80 percent!), this is never far from our minds at The Locavore. This makes it both exciting and rewarding for us to launch the Woman Farmer Project. 

 

Stewarded by The Locavore in collaboration with the Doc Society Climate Story Unit, the Woman Farmer Project is a multimedia storytelling initiative that documents and amplifies the lived experiences, knowledge systems, and everyday labour of women farmers across India’s food landscapes.

 

Through collaborations between storytellers, grassroots organisations, and community distribution networks, the project explores new ways of telling impactful climate stories that centre women as knowledge-holders, decision-makers, and cultural anchors, examining their role in our food, labour, and care systems.

As we’ve shaped the idea of the project, we’ve thought long and hard about how we can document women’s knowledge, joys, challenges, and adaptive strategies across distinct food landscapes in India without romanticising resilience or reducing their experiences to crisis narratives. 

 

Take, for example, this story from Kolkata—Gariahat Bajaar’s Shaak Maashis Can Always Predict My Dinner Menu. Here, ‘Shaak maashis’—women selling leafy vegetables—speak about foraging for greens, the camaraderie they share with each other and with regular customers, and dole out advice on what to eat when, and with what. 

 

Documenting the lives of the women, Srishti Dasgupta Sensharma writes, “Rekha di and Kajol maashi, for example, live near the Sundarbans. The terrain, in the heart of the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta, consists mostly of low-lying wetlands with alluvial soil where wild edible plants grow aboundingly. In the absence of sufficient cultivated foods, foraging permitted one to put something nutritious on their plates. In that way, they tell me, the rich knowledge of foraging and wild food is relegated to those who have little land and income.”

Are Rekha and Kajol farmers in the way we understand them? Are fisherwomen—who harvest the waters according to season and tide, who measure, and dry, and sell—also farmers? What about women belonging to forest-dwelling communities? 

 

As we moved through these questions we decided to focus on three distinct geographies: the hills of Meghalaya, the drylands of Madhya Pradesh, and the coastline of Tamil Nadu. By doing so, we hope to foreground the rich agricultural diversity these regions bring forth, and expand our own understanding of women farmers in the process. 

 

In order to have enough time to work on the Woman Farmer Project meaningfully, it incorporates a four-month immersive storytelling fellowship (May-August 2026) for young Indian women journalists, filmmakers, writers, researchers, and storytellers between the ages of 18 and 29 years with an interest in covering women in agriculture and related themes such as climate, food systems, policy, and culture. Fellows will spend extended time with communities and partner organisations in the three focus regions, allowing stories to emerge through trust, observation, and everyday interaction.

 

If you’ve ever wanted to document stories in detail and with equal rigour and care—whether through video, audio or text—this is a great opportunity to work closely with agrarian communities and shape stories that go beyond parachuting in and out of a place. And if you know someone who might be an ideal fit, please forward this to them!

If you’ve gone over the application and have questions for us, we will be hosting an open house to answer all your queries at 5.30 p.m. on 23 March, 2026. 

 

Join me, and we can talk more about what this paid fellowship holds in store for you!

 

Joining us as grassroots partners on the Woman Farmer Project are three organisations whose work constantly inspires us. The North East Society for Agroecology Support (NESFAS), based out of Shillong, Meghalaya, is a platform dedicated to revitalising, safeguarding, and promoting Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems. NESFAS works closely with Indigenous communities in North East India, recognising and emphasising the role of women as guardians of biodiversity, food, land, people, and nutrition.

 

The Network for Conserving Central India (NCCI) works towards conserving biodiversity, improving livelihoods, and fostering sustainable development in the landscapes of the Central Indian Highlands, spanning Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra, by linking diverse knowledge systems with collaborative action.

 

Dakshin Foundation builds grassroots’ capacities to secure ecosystems and rights and engage in conservation and environmental decision-making. Their goal is to promote ecologically and socially appropriate approaches to conservation and natural resource management in coastal and marine ecosystems in India.

The Woman Farmer Project goes beyond just producing stories; it asks what ethical collaboration in storytelling can look like in practice. 

 

How can grassroots organisations meaningfully shape stories, and not just facilitate access? What does it take to support young women storytellers without extraction or performative inclusion? How does community-rooted distribution change the afterlife and usefulness of climate stories? 

 

And finally, what forms of collaboration are sustainable and worth reproducing? If you know of storytellers, women community leaders, organisations, or distribution networks we should be working with, do write to me—I would love to reach out to them.

 

Come, co-create with us!