Every Single Farmer Here Sells the Same Way: Roadside

Gajapati district sits in Odisha's hilly Eastern Ghats, a tribal-dominated region where farming is rain-fed, landholdings are small, and market access has historically taken a back seat to production and food-security research in the state. A team from Centurion University of Technology and Management set out to fill that specific gap: not another study of what Gajapati farmers grow, but how they actually sell it, surveying 40 farming households across ten villages in and around Paralakhemundi — Uppalada, Kasinagar, Nuagada, R. Udayagiri, Gosani, Jeerango, Chandragiri, Tangudi, and Changudi Agraharam — during 2024-2025.

The sample skewed middle-aged and male: 60% men, 40% women, with 76% of respondents between 30 and 49 years old and youth participation notably low at under 12%. Education was basic across the board — 70% had only primary schooling, 30% secondary — which the paper ties directly to limited ability to access market information or adopt digital tools. Farming was effectively the only income source for 97.5% of respondents, and the majority (62.5%) earned less than ₹15,000 a month. Vegetable cultivation for market sale was the exception rather than the rule: 62.5% of farmers didn't grow vegetables commercially at all, with the 37.5% who did mostly growing cauliflower, cabbage, and potatoes as a supplementary crop rather than a primary one.

The single most striking number in the paper isn't a percentage close to 100 — it's exactly 100. Every one of the 40 farmers surveyed sells through roadside stalls as their direct-to-consumer channel, full stop. Not a mix of channels with roadside dominant; not most farmers with a minority using something else. Zero cooperative marketing, zero use of e-NAM or any digital agricultural marketplace, zero farmers' market or organized short supply chain of any kind. For a district this size, that's less a finding about farmer preference and more a signal that no real alternative currently exists on the ground.

Asked to name their biggest obstacle, 62.5% of farmers pointed to poor transport and logistics — unsurprising in hilly terrain served by rough roads, but the practical effect is what matters: perishable produce has to move fast or not at all, which forces farmers to sell quickly and cheaply right where they stand rather than seeking a better price further away. Limited consumer awareness came next (25%), meaning nearby towns often simply don't know these farmers or their produce exist. Perishability of the produce itself, in the absence of any cold storage, was the third barrier (12.5%) — a problem that compounds the transport issue rather than standing apart from it, since better roads without storage would only partially help.

As striking as the 100% roadside-sales figure is a second unanimous result: all 40 farmers reported receiving no government or institutional support whatsoever for marketing or production. This lands directly against India's national policy narrative — e-NAM, Farmer Producer Organisations, market reform — none of which appears to have reached this particular set of villages in any form the farmers recognized. The paper frames this as a policy outreach failure specific to remote, hilly, tribal districts rather than a general critique of the national programs themselves.

The researchers ran a chi-square test to check whether these barriers concentrated among a particular age group — the intuitive guess being that older farmers face more difficulty adapting to change. They didn't find one: age group and income bracket showed no statistically significant relationship (χ²=1.79, df=9, p=0.994), meaning income struggles were spread fairly evenly across age groups rather than being an "older farmer" problem specifically. The barriers here look structural — road quality, storage infrastructure, policy reach — rather than a matter of individual farmers' adaptability.

Despite everything above, 70% of farmers believe consumers trust their produce specifically because it's fresh, local, and chemical-free. That's a meaningful asset sitting mostly unused: a district-wide reputation for trustworthy produce, with almost none of the infrastructure — transport, storage, organized marketing, digital reach — needed to convert that trust into a larger, more stable customer base beyond whoever happens to walk past the roadside stand that day.