Members of the Small Organic Farmer Association (SOFA) are small-scale farmers who grow tea, spices and vegetable crops for the market and for home consumption. Most of the smallholdings are on land which was formerly a state-run tea plantation located near the town of Gampola, around 40 minutes drive from Kandy in Sri Lanka.

SOFA has 553 members with a total of more than 1,500 family members. In some cases the whole family is employed in their fields; around 135 members are women farmers who work the fields while their husbands go out to work; a further 15 are widows who run their own farms. Membership will increase when those in conversion to organic production become certified.
Tea provides up to 100% of the farmers’ income from their farm, depending on what other cash crops they grow. Most farmers also work as labourers in tea plantations, on construction sites or in factories to supplement their income.

Their produce is processed and exported by Bio Foods (Pvt) Ltd, a devoted organic and Fair Trade company established in 1993 in the Central Province of Sri Lanka.

Bio Foods
Bio Foods is a commercial company that processes and exports organic agricultural products such as tea and spices supplied by small-scale farmers’ organisations. It was instrumental in setting up SOFA and establishing their organic conversion programme. Bio Foods’ philosophy is to work in partnership with its suppliers to support the economic and agricultural development of the farmers’ organisations and their communities.

Its mission is to work with disadvantaged farmers to produce a range of quality organic products for export, at the same time contributing to the socio-economic development of the farmers’ agricultural communities.

Mrs Thamara Weerasena
Mrs Weerasena is vice president of SOFA’s Nillamba Organic Branch Society (Block No 14). It has 18 members and is one of three societies that make up the Gurukele Branch Society which has a total of 97 members located around Gurukele village.

The family tea farm is a ten-minute walk from the nearest dirt road and is approached through the jungle by a narrow track that winds up and down several steep valley sides. At two acres, their farm is larger than most other SOFA members. The land was bought from the government by Mr Nuwarage’s father in 1952. Mrs Weerasena came to live here as a 19-year-old when she married her husband in 1980.

Mrs Weerasena is responsible for the tea farm and works on it most days. Her husband works as a driver for the Central Transport Board and helps on his day off, and the children help in their spare time.

Times are improving for the family but for many years they struggled to survive on Mr Nuwarage’s wages as a driver. In the past, Mrs Weerasena’s sparse tea bushes were neglected and provided little income for the family. The bushes were old and not very productive and in any case the price paid by middlemen was too low to make investment in time and money worthwhile.

Healthcare has always been a problem and keeping their children in school is expensive. Sometimes she had to borrow money from neighbours or from the bank and pawn her gold jewellery to pay the interest.

But things have greatly improved since SOFA was established. The farmers now sell all the green leaf they can grow directly to Bio Foods at a much higher price - Rs31/kg compared to Rs15 paid by local intermediaries. And then Bio Foods provided free clonal tea plants paid for by the premium money from Fairtrade sales. Mrs Weerasena proudly pointed to the areas that were cleared and replanted. The new plants are now strong and healthy and have enabled her to increase green leaf production from 10 kilos a month to 90 kilos.

It took a lot of hard work to convert to organic production; Mrs Weerasena had to learn to make organic compost heaps, the essence of organic agriculture, and manual weeding has replaced the use of chemical weed killers. But she is enthusiastic about the benefits that six years of organic agriculture have brought; she is now an expert in making high quality organic compost, especially now that she has her own animals to provide dung.

Mrs Weerasena grows spices such as cinnamon and now plans to plant turmeric as well. These enterprises are mutually beneficial: SOFA provides plants or seeds to start the business and farmers from Bio Food’s spice projects give agricultural advice; eight months later when the crop is harvested, payment for a small part of the crop is returned to SOFA to cover the costs of the plants or seeds, and thereafter the business is in profit. She is enthusiastic about starting more small-scale income generating schemes with SOFA’s support.