A small farm

Farming advice usually arrives as either a government scheme or a sales pitch. This is neither. It is four habits, each of which needs a notebook and a phone, and nothing else.

Nothing here costs money.

1. One page per plot, per season

For each plot, keep a single page. On it, write down everything you spend as you spend it — seed, fertiliser, pesticide, labour, water and power, transport — and then what you sold, how much of it, and at what rate.

At the end of the season, add up each side.

This sounds too simple to matter. It is the single most useful thing on this page, because it answers a question almost nobody can actually answer: which crop paid you, not which crop yielded most. Those are different, and they are often not the same crop. A good yield sold at a bad rate, after an expensive input, can lose money while looking like a success.

Photograph the page at the end of every week so a lost or rain-damaged notebook is not a lost season.

2. Know the price in more than one place before you load the vehicle

Rates differ between nearby mandis on the same morning, and the gap is often larger than the extra diesel. Once a week, note what your crop is fetching at the two or three places you could realistically reach — from whoever you can ask, and from whatever is published.

Six weeks of that is enough to be worth something. You can type the notes into Claude — a free AI assistant you open in a phone browser — as loosely as you like:

These are the rates I noted for my crop at two mandis over six weeks. Which was usually better, and by how much? Keep it simple.

It will do the arithmetic. You still make the decision — it does not know which buyer pays on time, which one weighs honestly, or which road is cut.

3. Photograph a sick plant and ask, then confirm it

If leaves are spotting, curling or yellowing and you are not sure why, take a clear photograph in daylight — close up, and one of the whole plant — and ask Claude what it might be and what else to look for.

This is a starting point, not a diagnosis. These systems state wrong things with complete confidence; that is not a rare fault, it is how they work. Use the answer to know what to check and what question to ask, then confirm with your extension officer or with someone locally who has seen it before.

Confirm it before you spend money on a chemical. A wrong spray costs twice: what you paid, and the week you lost while the real problem carried on.

4. Get a second opinion before you buy an input

In most places the person who recommends the fertiliser or the pesticide is the same person who sells it. That is not necessarily dishonest, but it is not neutral either, and it is worth knowing which is which.

When a dealer recommends something, before you buy it, ask Claude what it is for, what it is normally used against, and what the cheaper standard alternatives are. Then ask the dealer the question the answer gave you.

You are not trying to catch anyone out. You are trying to walk in knowing what you are being sold, which changes the conversation on its own.

Be careful about

• Anyone who phones you offering a scheme, a subsidy or a loan and needs your bank details, your Aadhaar, or an advance "processing fee". Real schemes do not work by cold call.
• An OTP. Nobody legitimate ever needs one from you, for any reason.
• Urgency. Every one of these frauds needs you to act before you think. Putting the phone down and calling back on a number you already had defeats nearly all of them.

If you try one thing

Try the plot page. One page, one season. Everything else here gets better once you have it, and it is the only thing on this list that tells you something nobody else can tell you about your own land.