Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Saturday, 20 June 2026 called on farmers across India to join the central government's Khet Bachao Abhiyan (Save the Farm Campaign), urging them to pledge soil conservation, reduce chemical fertiliser use, and adopt natural farming practices. Invoking a call attributed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chouhan framed the campaign as a collective duty to protect the nation's agricultural land.

Context

Posting on X, Chouhan quoted Prime Minister Modi's appeal directly: 'हमें हमारी धरती माता को बचाना है' ('We must save our Mother Earth'). He described the Khet Bachao Abhiyan as a running initiative of the Government of India focused on three pillars — protecting soil health, cutting chemical fertiliser dependence, and promoting natural farming. The post was tagged with #PMKISAN, linking the campaign to the flagship direct-benefit scheme for farmers.

Chouhan urged citizens to join the campaign 'in the largest possible numbers', take a personal pledge to protect their own fields, and inspire neighbouring farmers to do the same. The message positions soil conservation not merely as an agricultural policy but as a patriotic and environmental obligation.

Policy Backdrop

The campaign draws on a decade-long policy lineage. The Soil Health Card Scheme, launched in 2015, created a nationwide infrastructure to test soil samples and advise farmers on balanced fertiliser use. In the same year, the Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana introduced cluster-based organic farming promotion to systematically reduce chemical inputs.

Natural farming received renewed emphasis in the Union Budget 2022-23, with subsequent policy addresses reinforcing the shift toward chemical-free agriculture. The PM-KISAN scheme, operational since 2019, provides ₹6,000 annual direct income support to eligible landholding farmer families and has become a platform through which sustainable-agriculture messaging is increasingly channelled. The #PMKISAN hashtag in the post signals an intent to connect the Khet Bachao Abhiyan's outreach with this established beneficiary network.

Stakeholders and Impact

Small and marginal farmers — who constitute the overwhelming majority of India's cultivator population — are the primary audience for this campaign. Decades of high chemical-input farming have contributed to soil degradation, falling organic matter content, and reduced long-term productivity across several major agricultural states. Natural farming and organic transitions are presented as both an environmental remedy and a cost-reduction measure for these households.

For the broader agricultural ecosystem, the campaign signals continued government pressure on fertiliser consumption patterns at a time when chemical fertiliser subsidies represent a significant fiscal burden. Encouraging behavioural change at the farm level, if scaled, could ease subsidy expenditure while aligning with India's international sustainable-development commitments.

What's Next

Attention will now turn to how the Khet Bachao Abhiyan is operationalised at the state level — whether natural-farming clusters are expanded under existing schemes, and whether campaign participation data is integrated with PM-KISAN records to track uptake among beneficiaries. Parliamentary questions on chemical-fertiliser reduction targets and budget allocations for organic-farming programmes in the coming legislative session will offer clearer signals of the initiative's institutional depth.

If the campaign succeeds in mobilising farmers at scale, it could mark a meaningful inflection point in India's long-running effort to rebalance its agriculture away from chemical dependency — a transition that soil scientists and climate-resilience advocates have long argued is overdue.