trichy to enhance the standard of living of small and marginal farmers in the state the agricultural department on saturday formally launched farmers producers groups fpg in trichy out of the targeted two lakh farmers to be brought under the scheme a total of 22700 have been identified in delta districts including trichyout of 10000 farmer interest group fig targeted to be formed across the state 1137 have been formed in trichy thanjavur tiruvarur and nagapattinam districts a total of 227 farmers producers groups fpg have been created in the four districts out of 2000 fpgs in the state agricultural production commissioner and principal secretary gagandeep singh bedi said at the statelevel seminar on collective farming held here on saturday that nearly 92 of operational holdings belongs to small and marginal farmers there were about 8118 lakh farm holdings of which 7447 lakh holdings belong only to them these farming communities have limited capacity to mobilise credit adopt latest technologies and to add value to their agriculture produce farm loans value addition etc they are also unable to market their produce at a remunerable price this leads to reduction in the agricultural production of the state in order to overcome all these hurdles the concept of collective farming has been evolved by the government this would help them have better access to loan facilities modern technologies with forward and backward linkages for marketing he addedwhile explaining the benefits of collective farming additional chief secretary finance k shanmugam asked the farmers to come out of the fear that they may lose identity and boundary of their landsnothing will change on your holdings but it will change your economy when everything is in a state of uncertainty it is important to switch over to the new programme otherwise small and marginal farmers can never face the problems alone he said he also called upon agriculture officials to take the benefits of collective farming to the farmers so that no one would be left out when farmers adopt collective farming they have a chance to face various risks rising out of weather price of their produce and reducing various expenses he added earlier agriculture minister r duraikannu formally launched the groups and distributed inputs to farmers state ministers vellamandi n natarajan and s valarmathi commissioner of agriculture marketing and agri business sj chiru director of horticulture and plantation crops archana patnaik district collector k rajamani joint directors of agriculture departments and hundreds of farmers from across the 31 districts participated in the programme