Women are central to India’s food systems—as cultivators, seed-keepers, processors, cooks, livestock rearers, forest and coastal food workers, and informal market actors—yet their labour and leadership remain underrepresented in mainstream narratives about farming and rural livelihoods. 

When women do appear in climate or agriculture storytelling, they are often framed in reductive ways, flattening the complexity of their daily work, their struggles and joys, and their lived realities. 

Timed with the UN-declared International Year of the Woman Farmer (2026), the Woman Farmer Project places women’s food labour front and centre, while intentionally resisting simplification. The Project features women farmers and women food workers as knowledge-holders, decision-makers, and cultural anchors, examining their role in food, labour, and care systems.

The Project brings together storytellers, grassroots partner organisations, media training partners, and community distribution networks to document these stories and circulate them in ways that remain meaningful to the communities themselves.

The Project goes beyond just producing stories; it also asks what ethical collaboration in storytelling can look like in practice. How can grassroots organisations meaningfully shape stories, and not just facilitate access? What does it take to support young women storytellers without extraction or performative inclusion? How does community-rooted distribution change the afterlife and usefulness of climate stories? What forms of collaboration are sustainable, ethical, and worth reproducing?

Through the Project, The Locavore aims to build a practical model for collaborative storytelling that centers communities, accountability, and long-term relationships.