The earth beneath Lakshmi Karre’s sparse cotton crop is hard and dry. Dressed in a flowery orange sari, she squats in the large gap between two plants and tugs at some brittle leaves, turned speckled brown by a fungal disease known as cotton rust.“When I was young we used to get 100 cotton bolls per plant,” she says. “There was no gap between the plants. Now they give only 9 or 10 bolls.”In recent years Lakshmi has seen pests and disease increasingly damage her small cotton field in Telangana, a state in southeastern India. To protect her yields she did the only thing she knew how, and bought more and more costly pesticides and fertilizers. But it was no use. “We sprayed chemicals so much to get rid of insects that our crop was destroyed, too,” says Lakshmi. “Farming has become a burden.”

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