Soil health is a slow crisis — and Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan took that message directly to the fields on Thursday, 22 October 2026, holding ground-level conversations with farmers in Tarawadi village, Haryana, under the Centre's Khet Bachao Abhiyan (Save the Farm Campaign).

Posting on X after the interaction, Chouhan wrote: 'Today, under the Khet Bachao Abhiyan, I had conversations with farmer brothers in Tarawadi village in Haryana. Seeing their enthusiasm for natural farming felt really good. The health of our Mother Earth should remain sound, chemical fertilisers should be used in a balanced way — this is the objective of this campaign.' He tagged the post with #KhetBachaoAbhiyan.

What Khet Bachao Abhiyan is asking farmers to do

The campaign is centred on two interlocking goals: reviving natural farming practices and pulling back from the unchecked use of synthetic chemical fertilisers that have quietly eroded soil quality across large stretches of Indian farmland. Chouhan's framing — 'Mother Earth's health' — is deliberate, pitching soil restoration not as a bureaucratic diktat but as an act of stewardship.

The Haryana interaction is part of a broader pattern of direct ministerial outreach to state-level farming communities, designed to carry the message beyond policy circulars and into village conversations. A farmer who hears the case from a visiting minister at a chaupal registers it differently from one who reads a government pamphlet.

A decade-long push rooted in Paramparagat Krishi

The policy lineage here runs back to 2015, when the Centre launched the Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana — a flagship scheme to promote organic farming clusters and reduce chemical input dependency. That initiative seeded a generation of farmer self-help groups experimenting with compost, bio-inputs, and crop rotation. Khet Bachao Abhiyan builds on that foundation, extending its reach to states like Haryana where intensive wheat-paddy cycles have put exceptional pressure on soil fertility.

Excessive fertiliser use — particularly nitrogen — has been linked to declining organic carbon in Indian agricultural soils, groundwater contamination, and ballooning subsidy bills. Balanced application, the campaign argues, protects both the land and the farmer's input costs.

Haryana's farming belt and why Tarawadi matters

Tarawadi sits in the heart of Haryana's agrarian belt, a region synonymous with the Green Revolution's most intensive gains — and its longest-running ecological costs. Choosing a Haryana village for this outreach carries a pointed symbolism: the very geography that powered India's wheat surplus is now being asked to pioneer its post-chemical pivot. The enthusiasm Chouhan described among farmers there, if it holds, would be a meaningful signal from one of India's most consequential farming populations.