Ex-Engineer Brought Goan Village With 500 Families Back to Farming After 30 Years

Nestor Rangel, a 52-year-old agriculturist, and his team, have helped 500 families in his native village of St Estevam to convert fallow and unused land into productive organic paddy fields.

Like most villages in Goa, the picturesque village on the river Mandovi was once a prime target for real estate developers looking at parcels of arable land lying fallow, to build concrete commercial and residential establishments. The village was even earmarked by developers for a coal transportation carriageway.

Nestor’s successful model of community farming, which began in earnest during the kharif season of 2018, is being seen as a means of obstructing the rapid conversion of farmland into concrete jungles. This has spawned similar initiatives in different Goan villages with local communities mindful of the need to protect their land and ecology.

Starting the Journey

An electronic engineer by trade, Nestor spent most of his life away from St Estevam in cities like Mumbai and subsequently Vadodara, where he was the manager of a factory owned by a Japanese multinational corporation AIWA manufacturing consumer electronics. In 2002, the factory shut down with the Japanese MNC closing shop around the world.

After the company shut down, he returned to Goa to open an electronics service centre and showroom dealing in consumer electronic products. With service centres in Margao and Panaji, he had about 40-odd employees working for him.

Everything changed in 2007, he decided to shut shop and venture into farming. Just before getting out of the electronics business, Nestor bought a 7-acre strip of land in Thane, a village in Goa’s Sattari Taluka. Today, this “strip of land” which extends upto 40 acres, includes a dairy, goat farm, a mango plantation of 700+ trees and a massive cashew orchard.

Farming