Kai Thota: Growing women-led agricultural collectives in India

Kai Thota is a women-led community-supported agriculture initiative based near Bannerghatta, Karnataka. Over the years, it has developed practical knowledge on regenerative farming, including crop planning, soil health, water management, seed saving, and collective production. These learnings have been documented through a technical guide that supports women in setting up and running regenerative farms. (kaithota.in)

However, our experience with Kai Thota has revealed that farming knowledge alone is not enough to sustain regenerative agriculture. The real challenge lies in building and sustaining the collective itself.

How do people come together around a shared vision of care for the land? How do they make decisions, navigate disagreements, share responsibilities, care for one another, and stay committed over time? How do women build confidence and leadership as stewards of land and food systems? How do collectives remain rooted in care, reciprocity, and ecological responsibility while adapting to changing realities?

Building on the experience of Kai Thota and conversations with women farmers, community groups, regenerative practitioners, and emerging women’s collective formations across Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, we want to co-create a set of principles and practices for women-led regenerative collectives.

Our goal is not to create a fixed model or blueprint. Every collective emerges from its own landscape, culture, relationships, and aspirations. Instead, we want to develop a set of principles that can help communities think through the process of forming, sustaining, and evolving collective institutions rooted in stewardship and care.

We are choosing to work with principles because they provide direction without prescribing outcomes. They can help communities navigate complex questions while leaving space for local interpretation, adaptation, and growth.

Through a series of participatory workshops across eight clusters in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, we will work with women to explore what it takes to sustain collective life.

The workshops will focus on questions such as:

• What enables a collective to thrive over time?
• What forms of care sustain people, communities, and ecosystems?
• How can leadership and responsibility be shared?
• How do collectives navigate tension, conflict, and change?
• What does stewardship look like in practice?
• How do women strengthen their role as custodians of land, food systems, and community wellbeing?
• How do we build collectives that recognise land, water, soil, seeds, biodiversity, and other more-than-human actors as part of the ecosystem we care for?

The project starts from the belief that regenerative agriculture is not only about restoring soil and growing food. It is also about restoring relationships between communities and land.

We see women-led collectives as an important vehicle for this work. These collectives create opportunities to share labour, knowledge, resources, and responsibility. They can strengthen local food systems, deepen ecological stewardship, and create new forms of connection between producers, consumers, and the landscapes that sustain them.

The principles that emerge from this process will not be presented as universal truths. They will be starting points. A shared language that can help communities think about care, stewardship, governance, participation, accountability, reciprocity, and resilience in ways that make sense for their own contexts.

Alongside this, we will document stories, practices, and learnings through accessible and creative formats. These may include films, digital media, visual guides, stories, illustrations, and other forms that emerge through the process. The aim is to create resources that can be shared, adapted, and used by communities beyond the project itself. Ultimately, this project is about strengthening women-led regenerative farming collectives.

It is about understanding what allows these collectives to endure, grow, and adapt. It is about creating practical and accessible resources that support collective stewardship of land. And it is about contributing to a broader movement that sees land not simply as a resource to be managed, but as a relationship to be nurtured through care, responsibility, and collective action.