Starter Kit. Idea 275 of 500. Cluster 14
Heritage rice varieties grown under contract and sold at ten times the commodity price
The mechanism, from the book
The smallholder sells raw to a collector at the gate and the collector sells to a packer who puts his own name on it. Denmark's farmers got rich the day they owned the creamery.
The first step
Buy a few sacks of one heritage rice variety from the farmer who grew it, pack it in kilo bags with the variety and the farm on the label, and offer it to a Sri Lankan grocery in London and an organic shop in the city. Ask for an opening order at a price per kilo that pays the farmer well above the commodity rate. The shop's reorder is the proof that the name sells.
- Who pays first
- A Sri Lankan grocery or organic shop whose customers want the rice their grandparents ate and will pay many times the ordinary price.
- What leaves today
- Heritage rice is grown in small plots and sold as ordinary paddy, so the price its name could command is never collected.
Ask first
- Department of Agriculture. Ask which heritage rice varieties they hold seed for, and how to get it.
- Sri Lanka Standards Institution. Ask how heritage rice can be tested to prove the variety.
Check before you spend
Whether each farmer signs a contract for the variety and the price, and how you prove the rice in the bag is the named variety.
Find out these three numbers
- What do shops abroad charge per kilo of heritage rice?
- How much will farmers grow under contract next season?
- What does milling and packing a kilo cost?
A comparison from the book
Denmark. Chapter Eleven
"Members signed binding contracts, usually for about 10 years"
A contract before planting gives the farmer a price and the brand a steady supply.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.