Is Stevia farming profitable and is the buyback as good as agents claim?

Be very careful with stevia. It is the natural sweetener crop and there is real demand from sweetener processors, but stevia is also one of the most aggressively mis-sold buyback crops in India, with agents quoting inflated income figures and selling costly planting material on a buyback promise that is often not honoured. The reality: there are only a limited number of genuine processing buyers, they need dry leaf of a certain quality, and many farmers were left with leaf they could not sell after the promoter vanished. Do not buy planting material from the same party promising buyback. Get the buyer name, the dry leaf price per kg, the quality standard and the quantity in writing, then independently confirm with a real processor that they are buying this season. The big income numbers in agent leaflets are usually unverified, so treat them as marketing, not fact, and start small.