Stewarded by The Locavore in collaboration with the Doc Society Climate Story Unit, the Woman Farmer Project is a multimedia storytelling initiative that documents and amplifies the lived experiences, knowledge systems, and everyday labour of women farmers across India’s food landscapes.
Through collaborations between storytellers, grassroots organisations, and community distribution networks, the project explores new ways of telling impactful climate stories grounded in lived realities.
Project Overview
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.
Project Objectives
Document women’s labour, knowledge, joys, challenges, and adaptive strategies across distinct food landscapes in India without romanticising resilience or reducing experience to crisis narratives.
Apply The Locavore’s long-term grounding in storytelling to produce stories across formats with ethical rigour.
Strengthen collaboration between The Locavore and its grassroots partners to build trust and ethical relationships with communities.
Support a cohort of young women storytellers and enable them to tell better stories through training, resources, and mentorship.
Create multi-format, reusable public resources in the form of reported stories, short films, and photo essays in multiple languages.
Facilitate community-rooted distribution of stories through screenings, conversations, and partnerships with local organisations.Generate field-level learning and document processes, challenges, and insights to contribute to broader conversations on ethical, collaborative storytelling.
Project Fellowship
At the heart of the Woman Farmer Project is a four-month immersive storytelling fellowship (May-August 2026) for young Indian women journalists, filmmakers, writers, researchers, and storytellers between the ages of 18 and 29 with a demonstrated interest in covering women in agriculture and related themes such as climate, food systems, policy, and culture.
This is a full-time fellowship that requires embedded fieldwork and storytelling. Fellows will be spending extended time with communities and partner organisations in their focus regions, allowing stories to emerge through trust, observation, and everyday interaction.
This fellowship is designed for individuals interested in storytelling, journalism, and cultural documentation rooted in principles of consent, transparency, care, independence, and accountability.
We will select six fellows across three distinct geographies in India, including the hilly terrains of Meghalaya, the coastline of Tamil Nadu, and drylands of Madhya Pradesh.
- Three Audio-Visual Fellows (one per region)
- Three Writer-Researcher Fellows (one per region)
Audio-Visual Fellow
Audio-Visual fellows will ideate, pitch, shoot, document, and edit stories about women in agriculture.
Each fellow will:
- produce a short documentary film
- publish a photo essay
- maintain field notes documenting their interactions and reporting process
- work closely with The Locavore’s Editorial and Culinary Research teams to record oral food memories, recipes, and culinary traditions for the Longing For Home series.
- photograph community members for The Locavore’s Everyday Locavore series.
Writer-Researcher Fellow
Writer-Researcher fellows will ideate, pitch, write, interview, and document stories about women in agriculture.
Each fellow will:
- report and write a longform feature
- publish a photo essay
- maintain field notes documenting their interactions and reporting process
- work closely with The Locavore’s Editorial and Culinary Research teams to document oral food memories, recipes, and culinary traditions for the Longing For Home series.
- interview community members for The Locavore’s Everyday Locavore series.
Fellowship Outcomes
The fellowship will generate a body of stories and documentation across multiple formats. Each regional team consisting of one writer-researcher fellow and one audio-visual fellow will work closely together during their field immersion to produce:
- Three longform reported features (2,000-2,500 words each) exploring the realities of women farmers and food workers.
- Three short documentaries (8-15 minutes each) documenting women’s labour, knowledge, and everyday experiences within local food systems.
- Three Everyday Locavore stories highlighting women who enrich and sustain food systems in various ways.
- Research on regional food practices, including documented recipes and oral food histories for the Longing for Home series.
- Field notes and reflections documenting the fellows’ observations, interactions, and learning from time spent on field.
- Three photo-essays capturing the lives of women farmers across the project’s regions.
The Collaboratives
The Woman Farmer Project is part of a global initiative by the Doc Society Climate Story Unit, called ‘The Collaboratives’, bringing leading cultural organisations, storytellers, and community networks from India, Kenya, Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil to work together in intentional partnership and explore new models for climate storytelling. Through the year, each country’s team will develop and test collaboration models that strengthen climate narratives while sharing learnings across regions.
“We’ve been longtime admirers of The Locavore and the innovative ways the team has produced great journalism, created immersive experiences, and built extensive community networks, in pursuit of providing the inspiration, joy, and commitment to a more climate-just future. We are excited by the potential of the Woman Farmer Project, and The Locavore‘s approach to supporting community-led narratives and galvanising an expansive ecosystem of partners and allies who can bring these stories into the mainstream.”
— Megha Agrawal Sood, Co-Executive Director, Doc Society
“By the end of this project, I hope we have done more than produce a strong body of stories and engagements. I hope we have helped make women’s food labour more visible, more legible, and harder to ignore—not as a side note to agriculture or climate change, but as something central to how food systems actually function.”
— Chef Thomas Zacharias, Founder, The Locavore
The purpose of the Doc Society Climate Story Unit is to support transformative storytelling in order to advance a climate-just and biodiverse future. Their mission is to rewild the mainstream, planting seeds of narrative that envision better futures for all while cultivating the ecosystem to support it.
The Woman Farmer Project is a multimedia storytelling initiative led by The Locavore in partnership with the Doc Society Climate Story Unit. It aims to build a roadmap for successful collaborations between storytellers, grassroots organisations, and community distribution networks across India for impactful climate storytelling.
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