A small number of Punjab farmers practise organic or natural farming, growing without synthetic fertiliser and pesticide, often with traditional wheat and rice varieties and direct marketing.
The Kheti Virasat Mission, based in the Malwa, has worked since the late 1990s on the health and ecological consequences of intensive agriculture and on promoting alternatives, and it emerged directly from the pesticide and health argument in Bathinda and Faridkot districts.
The economics are hard. Yields are lower, certification is expensive, and there is no procurement, so the farmer must find the buyer, which works for a few hundred farmers with urban customers and does not scale.
Traditional wheat varieties, and desi cotton, and the coarse grains that Punjab used to grow, survive with a small number of seed savers and in the Punjab Agricultural University gene bank.
The movement is small and its significance is that it is the only place in Punjab where an alternative cropping system is being run rather than proposed.
Whether it can be more than a demonstration depends on procurement, like everything else in this state.
There are several hundred farmers in Punjab working without chemical inputs, organised loosely through a few networks, and most of them are small and sell direct.
The obstacles are yield in the transition years, the absence of a premium market inside the state, and the fact that a neighbour's spray does not stop at the boundary.
Kheti Virasat Mission and a small number of similar bodies have run this work for over two decades. It is a demonstration rather than a movement and it is the only one there is.