The year was 1991…

This is when ‘profit-oriented marketing in Turkey began to drive families away from natural, unadulterated foods, with fast food advertisements intensifying on TV, while organic agriculture was not yet known.

Mehmet Ali Işık (our founder), could see the damage these unhealthy nutritional choices introduced in the early 90s would cause for the future, so he decided to start organic farming. With this vision, he and his team designed the first independent sustainability project in Turkey. This was before the digital age, when different villages with suitable resources and climatic conditions had to be identified using hand drawn maps. Işık Tarım’s agricultural teams went to the villages one by one to explain the importance of organic agriculture and how to do it properly. Organic agriculture was explained to the farmers gathered in village coffeehouses with presentations explaining all details. Farmers were encouraged to start organic agriculture. Before interested farmers were included in the project, our agriculturalists examined their lands. Farms found suitable were registered into the Happy Village Project. Regular training was provided to the registered farmers to increase their organic awareness.

But there was a big problem. In those years, as in today’s Turkey, there was an intensive inheritance-based land division, so fields were often very close to each other and very fragmented. While organic agriculture was being practiced in one field without the use of harmful chemicals, if chemicals were used in the land next to it, the chemicals would infect the organic farmland. It was not going to be easy to solve this, but from this difficulty our project and our brand were born.

There was only one way to solve this problem, by creating villages that were completely organicized.

Happy Villages…

Creating happy villages was made possible by raising the awareness of all the people in each village. We initially found traces of chemicals in the products coming to our factory, so we investigated and discovered that while the male farmers were trained, the other members of their households had naively used chemicals in the production areas, thinking that the harvests would be more efficient. In other words, the training given only to the men in each household was not enough. Therefore, our agricultural experts gathered the women and children in village houses and explained organic farming to raise the awareness of everyone involved.

Farmers who were initially hesitant to participate in the organic farming project later joined of their own accord after seeing the satisfaction of registered farmers.