Photographs taken by the field officer at the time of the interview. Select one to read that farmer's answers.
El Niño formed in the Pacific in June. By September the forecasters had stopped hedging: better than a 90% chance it becomes very strong, and a fair chance it ends up the strongest on record.
India felt it straight away. The monsoon came in short, nearly half the country’s districts finished below normal, and less rice went into the ground than last year. Those are national figures.
So we asked. In September a field officer put three questions to farmers in India, and to farmers around Mukuni in Zambia: what changed in the weather this year, what it did to the farm and the family, and what they expect next year. All of them are MATI farmers, so all of them have rock dust on their fields. Each answered in their own voice, on a phone, with a stamped photograph. What they said is the report.
These are stories rather than a survey. A farmer in Amadand and a farmer in Mukuni are two people describing two fields.
They also do not agree with each other, and that is the useful part. In India the farmers describe a monsoon that arrived late and cost them money before it cost them any yield, and two of them bring up the rock dust without being asked. In Zambia they describe a season of good rain just finished, an El Niño they have so far only read about in a forecast, and none of them raises the rock. The rock is on all of their fields either way, so that last difference is in what the farmers mentioned. They point in different directions and both are printed here.
What the farmers in India told us.
The monsoon had already come and gone when these were recorded. The Zambian farmers were describing a different season on a different calendar, and they follow.
They had to wait this year for the rain.
Most described rain that arrived late or fell out of time. Yogeshwar Pratap Singh said it came about ten days later than last year, and named El Niño for it, from the news. Ganesh Rathore said the rain was due in the middle of July and arrived well after that. Krishna Rai ran the irrigation in order to transplant paddy at all. Umashankar Bopche put his own village at 40% less rain than last year, which is his estimate rather than a measured one.
Not all of them. Prakash Jaiswal called the rainfall good and the conditions favourable. Ujjwal Mondal said they got as much as they needed. Prashanta Mondal put this year's rain level with last year's. Yugal Kishor Thakur described less rain rather than late rain, and Biknu Gurjar answered about the heat in April and the rain that fell through last year's harvest.
Then the rain came all at once.
Fields waterlogged after transplanting. Herbicide washed off before it had worked. The windows for fertiliser and pesticide opened and shut inside a week. Biknu Gurjar described the same pattern at the other end of the year, rain falling through the harvest in October and November 2025. Rakesh Kumar Baghde said the rain came in broken spells, and that disease struck his fields two and three times over.
The 14% deficit counts how much rain fell. These farmers are describing when it fell.
Here come the pests. The borer.
Yogeshwar Pratap Singh said the borer hit the fields he transplanted late, and that spraying brought it down in some areas without controlling it fully. Yugal Kishor Thakur's account puts it at the sky staying covered for a long stretch, then heavy pest pressure, then a chemical bill. In Gulalgachhi and Padampur the same insect turns up by name.
The calendar slips, the crop meets the pest at a stage it would normally have passed, and the farmer buys chemistry nobody had budgeted for.
Experiences at home that were shared with us.
Costs rose before any yield moved at all. Extra irrigation to establish the crop. More fertiliser. Chemicals against the pest flush. Labour and tractor rates both up, because every farmer in the district wanted both in the same narrow window. Laxman Turi and Krishna Rai both named the tractor and the labour directly.
The households show up too. Yogeshwar Pratap Singh said the heat wave took his health and cut his income, so the family cut its spending. Prashanta Mondal said labourers who could normally weed for four or five hours were finished within two or three. Birbal Soren, Laxman Turi and Rakesh Kumar Baghde named colds and fever at home as the weather swung hot and cold, and Dhena Soren colds and coughs.
A farmer can lose money in a season the yield figures call average.
Different villages had different experiences.
The clearest comparison sits inside the eastern cluster, where the villages lie within about 90km of each other. Samlapur and Phulpahari report a good season. Gulalgachhi and Patharia report trouble.
Asaman Hansda, in Phulpahari, said the rain started in the last week of July and the crop has been very good since. About 85km away in Gulalgachhi, Pravakar Mondal said disease appeared in the paddy and the rain damaged other crops. Deepak Kumar described a healthy field beside a neighbouring field that had disease in it.
Villages this close together did not all have the same season. Rock dust does not explain the split, because every farmer here has it, the two villages reporting trouble included. Nor does the survey record rainfall for any village, so nothing in it accounts for why these four differ.
Two farmers raised it themselves, without being asked. Both used the same word for what had gone on their field, matipurak, one writing it in Devanagari and one in Latin letters. Prakash Jaiswal said that after matipurak went on, the crop changed against last year, the pesticide use came down and the yield went up. Nimai Tudu went further:
That is a farmer's account of his own field. MATI has no El Niño year control and no measurement linking rock dust to water holding.
Zambia, before the rains.
Farmers around Mukuni, outside Livingstone, answered the same three questions and described the opposite year.
Their calendar is not India's. In southern Africa the main rains arrive from November, so these farmers are describing the season behind them and the one they are about to plant into. The season behind them was a good one. After a 2024 / 25 that came up short of rain, they describe 2025 / 26 as adequate to favourable, and the harvest with it. Dominic Nyambe is the one who qualifies it: enough rain, but enough to waterlog and cost him some of the crop.
The other difference is what nobody said. In India two farmers brought up the rock dust on their own, without being asked. These five have the same rock on their fields and not one of them mentions it. They had a good season and so had nothing to account for, the three questions asked about the weather rather than about what goes on the field, and their answers reach us as the field team's summaries, the form most likely to lose a passing remark.
These farmers all work around Mukuni, and there is no earlier Zambian season here to set beside them.
Read the farmers in ZambiaWhat they expect next.
Asked about next year, almost nobody in India named rain. They named heat, and they named the water under the field.
Yogeshwar Pratap Singh said the water under his field has dropped from 40 feet to somewhere between 70 and 80. Deepak Kumar has no tubewell and expects the water to arrive late. Ganesh Rathore, Biknu Gurjar and Prakash Jaiswal all named heat. Yugal Kishor Thakur said the felling of trees will have to stop if the heat is to be held down. Nimesh Rahangdale said the heat is climbing faster every year.
Their worry has moved from the rain to the water under the field.
One farmer has already decided what to do about it. Naiki Hansda said that if next year looks like less rain, the crop will change from paddy to maize or millets.
In Zambia this El Niño is still a forecast rather than a season. Dominic Nyambe repeats what the Meteorological Department has said about below normal rain in parts of Southern Province, and adds that conditions can change as the season goes on. Martin Mushabati expects adequate rain. Veronica Mukuni says she cannot tell what is coming.
The forecast is on the record. SADC favours drier than normal conditions across much of southern Africa for the 2026 / 27 rains, and flags Zambia for below normal rainfall risk in the first quarter of 2027. What the farmers in this report describe happened under an El Niño that was still strengthening. The season they are preparing for is the one ahead.
Where they are.
Select a farmer to jump to their response.
India
A schematic locator drawn from public coastline data, not authoritative on any boundary. Positions come from the GPS recorded with each response.
Zambia
Drawn from Natural Earth country outlines. The same locator, with the same caveat on every boundary.
Every farmer, in their own words.
Every response, as it was recorded. Answers given in Hindi or a local language appear as the farmer gave them, with the English beneath. This page reads the survey live, so a farmer appears here as soon as the field team records the response.
The Zambian interviews were spoken in Chitonga, which no machine transcribes. Their English comes from the field team in Livingstone, who listened to the recordings and wrote down what was said. Those cards say so.
Context for El Niño's weather.
The national picture the farmers’ season sits inside, and where each figure at the top of this report comes from.
NOAA's Climate Prediction Center has had an El Niño Advisory in force since 11 June. Its 10 September update gives a greater than 90% chance of a very strong event through autumn and winter, and a 75% chance that October to December runs stronger than any El Niño on record back to 1950. The International Research Institute puts the probability at 100% through February to April 2027.
India felt it straight away. The India Meteorological Department recorded 603.7mm of rain between 1 June and 31 August against a normal of 700.7mm, which is 14% below normal, and by 25 August 348 of the country's 741 districts were short of normal rain. On 11 September the Agriculture Ministry counted 426.81 lakh hectares of paddy planted against 443.78 lakh hectares at the same point last year, a drop of 4%.
Everything these farmers describe happened under an El Niño that had not yet reached full strength. Forecasters expect it to keep building to the end of this year and run on into 2027. SADC forecasts drier than normal conditions for the 2026/27 rains across much of southern Africa, where MATI also works.
Rice is where the shortfall landed.
Kharif paddy area planted in India, counted on 11 September, this year against last.
Source: Agriculture Ministry sowing figures, 11 September 2026. The Ministry publishes in lakh hectares: 426.81 this year against 443.78 last year.
What the rock is worth in an ordinary year.
These figures come from MATI's own paired plots in India, in ordinary years rather than this one. They are the baseline this season should be read against.
The persistence figure comes from a smaller cohort and a different method from the other three. It follows 45 farmers in Chhattisgarh whose fields had one application in 2023, measures the same fields again in 2025 against the 25% uplift they saw in the first year, and takes the yields as the farmers reported them rather than by crop cut.
Farmers pay nothing for this, in money, labour or time. Carbon revenue funds the whole operation.
What this season says.
Read together, the answers in this report say three things.
The first is that the cost of a bad season arrives before the harvest does. In India the monsoon came late and then all at once. Farmers paid to irrigate a crop that should have been rain-fed, paid for chemicals against a pest flush that a normal calendar would have spared them, and paid peak rates for labour and tractors because every neighbour needed them in the same short window. Some of these farmers will bring in an ordinary harvest and still end the year poorer than they began it. The national figures count how much rain fell and how much land was planted. They do not count that.
The second is that the season was local. Villages within 90km of one another had different years: a good crop and no pests in Samlapur and Phulpahari, disease and damage in Gulalgachhi and Patharia. The survey recorded no rainfall for any village, so the report cannot say why, and it does not guess. Anyone who comes to these pages for a single verdict on El Niño and Indian farming will not find one.
The third is that the year ahead matters more than the one just finished. In India the farmers' worry has moved from the rain to the water under the field, which one of them has watched fall from 40 feet to 70 or 80. In Zambia the good season is over and the forecast for the next one is dry. Everything in this report happened under an El Niño that had not yet reached full strength.
Every field in this report has MATI's rock dust on it. The report does not claim the rock protected anyone's harvest this season, and nothing here measures it. The figures in the section above come from ordinary years, and they are the baseline against which the next season should be read. Two farmers raised the rock without being asked, and their words stand as their own. The rest of that case will be made by measurement, or not at all.