Dayalbagh Educational Institute (DEI) started a MBA in Agriculture Management in 2017 with a batch of 21 bright students. In a recent course on “Business Models” the students and us professors, were looking at learning of entrepreneurial alternatives in Agriculture to the all-pervasive but highly unsustainable “High on Chemicals” Farming.
And who better to turn to than Harsh Lohit, my ex-Boss, who after leaving a highly successful entrepreneurial journey in the Corporate world, became a full time organic farmer at Mangar village in Faridabad.
Harsh was one of the founders of Headstrong/ TechSpan, is a secular torch bearer breaching religious and caste barriers in this divided world, has a deep understanding of farmer issues (given that he is genetically predisposed to it being the grandson of Ex-PM Chaudhary Charan Singh, who was one of the greatest thinkers on rural India and for the upliftment of the agricultural community) and runs the Chaudhary Charan Singh archives.
We had Harsh over at DEI a few weeks back to take us through his journey of discovering his connect with the earth and the soil.
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| Harsh at DEI with MBA (Agriculture) and Botany Students |
In this post Harsh takes us along on his journey from being a health-conscious individual to an organic farmer with deep insights listening every day to the chatter of the living soil.
Regards,
Anurag
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Harsh writes…
Natural Farming at Aman Bagh
Introduction
Farming Feeds
Natural farming has been a journey of self-discovery and transformation since I first applied the sustainable ways of my peasant ancestors in early 2012 on 6 acres at Aman Bagh in south Haryana.
My journey commenced with a simple story of ‘No chemicals!’ and has taken me to places I could not then imagine.
I have moved from tractor tilling, to bullock ploughing, to partly no-till; from mono-cropping to crop rotation, multi-cropping and green manuring; from annual food crops and the plough-violence that entails on the soil to 50% perennial bio-diverse fruit ‘forests’; from focusing on above-the-soil production to understanding the world of life below the soil; and building the biology in the soil.
I understood the ongoing devastation of handloom and craft livelihoods, the terrifying state of and prognosis for our environment, the intensive overuse of chemicals in growing food in what was so recently an organic-by-default nation, our unhealthy individual food choices in what is the world’s only vegetarian-cuisine nation, and the ongoing destruction of individual health.
Nothing I write on natural farming approaches and methods in this essay is revolutionary or original; I only document what I have learnt from peasants who work with me, other natural farmers, from natural systems discovered by reading the pioneers of natural farming, and from my short five years of experiences. Jaivic, organic, Rishi Kheti, permaculture, sustainable, biological, and agro-ecology: all these terms include a range of related methods that enable humans engage with nature to grow food in an ecologically sustainable manner. ‘Ecological’ is used here in its broadest sense, including within its fold the entire scope of interrelationships - political, economical and social - of all living things with the environment.
Rural Heritage
My peasant ancestors were hardy farmers in what was once undivided Punjab (today Haryana) before migrating to Bulandshahr & Meerut districts in Uttar Pradesh over the past few centuries as population pressure on farming land increased. They were the salt of the earth – mostly small tenants before the abolition of Zamindari in the early 1950s. Even after that they remained small farmers, only a few owning land more than 5 acres. (Since then, farms have fragmented with each generation and farms in India are on average slightly more than 1 acre). All of them were ‘organic-by-default’ peasants till the late 1960s, and the long-established ways of their ancestors enabled them retain the fertility of their land over millennia of intensive farming.
After the chemical-led ‘Green’ Revolution in the 1970s they became slaves to the market, lost their organic connect to the land and have become addicts to chemical poisons from distant factories. The local cycle of environmental sustainability – of growth and decay, as Albert Howard reminds us - was broken. Fertiliser, pesticides, seeds, electricity and tractors were supplied to them as resources to exploit the land for production; and the farm became just another factory.
My maternal grandfather was Charan Singh, the pre-eminent peasant leader and rural intellectual of independent India, and the deep imprint of his simplicity, exemplary personal character, personality and thoughts will need a separate essay. I was 25 when he passed, and I had spent the last decade of his life spent in Delhi basking in his vast, loving and motivating presence. He influences me at another level now as I work to protect for posterity his vast intellectual heritage (over 10 scholarly books, for example) on the imbalance between rural and urban India, of the meaning and methods of Indian development, his prescription of agriculture first in India, handloom-handicrafts and other village and small industry as the solution for rural livelihoods, and appropriate large industry and technology as a sustainable and equitable path for India’s masses. He wanted people to move off agriculture as soon as society could afford this, but they had to have something productive to do while they were in the village (hence agriculture for the peasants and non-farm employment for the landless) and something to do when they reached the city (he predicted India would always have large numbers in the village as there just weren’t enough urban jobs for our multitudes).
He stood for small peasants, organic farming methods, small irrigation projects, small industry; green before his time.
Nothing could have prepared me for the complete change in worldview that this reconnect with the ways of my ancestors has wrought.
“There has always been lack of equilibrium, rather a sort of antagonism between cities and the countryside. This is particularly so in our land where the gulf of inequality between the capitalist class and the working-class pales into insignificance before that which exists between the peasant farmer in our village and the middle-class town dweller. India is really two worlds-rural and urban. The relationship between the countryside and the cities is, therefore, a vital problem to us.” Charan Singh, India’s Economic Nightmare. 1984
Natural Farming at Aman Bagh
Part II: 2012-2014
I had to absorb generations of knowledge while on the job, in addition to reviving forgotten traditional practices lost to ‘lazy’ chemical farming, for a natural farm to start to take shape on the sandy, degraded, low organic matter land in the Mangar valley. This ‘Bhur’ (sandy) soil was quite unlike the alluvial, silt soil of my native village in Bulandshahr next to the Ganga.
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| Aman Bagh, June 2012 |
Aman Bagh is in the hot & arid south-west region of Haryana, receiving 300-500 mm rain a year; 80% of this in the months of July and August. Strong NW winds blow in May, when the sun can take the temperature in the soil to 50 degrees Centigrade. Our soil is ‘coarse sand’, very low (<0.2%) in organic matter. We are located in the Mangar valley where the surrounding Aravalli hill range radiates heat in the summer and traps cold in the winter thereby creating a challenging microclimate for most of the year. We experience extreme temperatures, from a low of 5 degrees C in January to 47 degrees C in May, and high humidity in the 3 monsoon months.
The People Challenge
Finding the right people to run the farm was a foundational decision. I knew that the peasant is a transformed man when he works his own land and is a much lazier one working on someone else’s. I needed to find men and women with a strong work and moral ethic who I could convince, through good wages, caring and compassion, to treat Aman Bagh as their own.
We retain our original five local peasants and have since built a camaraderie based on mutual interests and respect. The men are from Dhauj, a majority Muslim village close to Mangar, and share with the locally dominant Hindu Gujjar peasants’ the language and all aspects of an agrarian way of life and little in common with their urban co-religionists. Rajan, our cook with magic in her hands, is a landless Dalit from the Chamar (once the leather skinning) community. They get time off when they need, and I’ve realised they enjoy the discipline of work and would rather be here than at home or elsewhere.
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| The Aman Bagh Five, 2013 |
There is a powerful localization lesson in this: all are local marginal or landless peasants, they understand the local cropping patterns, the weather, the seeds, the soil, the cattle, the food; and they are embedded in a local, community network. Abdul Sattar, the supervisor, is a walking encyclopedia of local farming and ecological knowledge and has been my professor in the ways of traditional farming. It is a tragedy of contemporary civilization that a peasant can be labeled unskilled and uneducated simply because he hasn’t studied in the formal school system. In his environment, he is one of the most knowledgeable man I have come across.
Peasants in India are conservative and generally slow to change. They are risk averse due to their life of subsistence, and Sattar was slow and cautious, skeptical, and opposed reviving the old ways of his grandfather as he clung to the security of chemical farming. This needed initial firmness on the key boundary condition of farming at Aman Bagh: no chemicals, no matter what. The real work could begin only once this became established, which took years.
Manure, Irrigation and Seeds
The two key operational issues I grappled with first were organic fertilization of the sandy, low-carbon soil and the need for responsible irrigation. Cattle were the essential solution for natural farming, important for their dung rather than their milk. Indian traditions integrated cattle and farming in a manner unprecedented in world agriculture, and this is one of the secrets of the fertility of our soil. This came as a startling revelation, and I started to understand the reverence the cow has in the eyes of the villager: its dung formed the foundation of soil fertility over millennia of intensive farming, its milk the basis of family nutrition, and bullocks the only source of energy till recently.
For irrigation, we sunk a bore-well to 100 feet and invested in a comprehensive drip and sprinkler system that grids the entire farm to minimise both water use and irrigation effort. Little did I realise in 2012 that underground aquifer water is a limited resource under severe stress as we extract more than we put back. This is especially true for Aman Bagh where a once large, natural perennial pond that abuts our land is now a dry bed and encroached agricultural land.
I started to understand seeds in 2013: the differences between open pollinated, hybrid and GMO; and the need to save my own seeds as part of ‘Seed Swarajya’ and controlling input costs. For example, I bought indigenous tall wheat variety MP306 from the seed-saving NGO Navdanya, and we use these as seeds till date. Sattar buys open-pollinated seeds that are yet available at the village seed store for common crops like mustard, millet, sorghum, oats, clover and many vegetables. Local seeds are genetically suited to our soil, moisture and ecology; they often thrive when seeds from outside fail.
We implemented the cycle of traditional cropping on all the land: ploughing, sowing, watering, de-weeding and reaping; and again. This wasn’t stressful on my men and woman, as they knew this life and it gave them plenty of down time between cycles – why we see farmers lounging around in the village. I knew nothing about growing food without ploughing.
Bullocks
For the first year, we used a hired tractor, in the next year we hired a set of bullocks with a peasant hali (plough-man) from Dhauj village, and in 2013 we purchased our own pair of Hariana bullocks for the princely sum of rupees 14,000 from the neighboring village of Bandhwari. Momi was appointed our hali, and he is absolutely brilliant as he navigates them with expertise and ease. Dalsher and Shamsher, our bullocks, cost us a fraction of a tractor, live off the hay and green-feed from our land, and give us valuable dung that we use as manure, haven’t once fallen sick. The tractor is expensive, replaces labour in a country whose biggest problem is creating employment for the rural poor, uses expensive imported diesel and all that entails, voids polluting diesel fumes and costs an enormous amount to maintain. For Indian small farms, 80% of all farming households, shared bullock services supported by government loans would be an ideal solution if we weren’t blinkered by the ideology of modernity.
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| Dalsher |
I knew nothing yet of the violence ploughing does to the soil (especially deep tractor ploughing, with all its iron attachments) in India’s arid or tropical environments: the breaking of the soil structure, the compacting of soil, exposure of soil to the elements where precious carbon escapes to the atmosphere as CO2, and the loss of moisture. “No Till” farming, as practiced by the Japanese sage-farmer Masanobu Fukuoka was yet in the womb of the future. I had read his ‘One Straw Revolution’ in my youth in 1979, without understanding it one bit; I went through it again. Actually, what I had to do was redefine food and nutrition in my head as fruits and harvests from perennial trees and not just annual cereals and lentil, but that thinking too was a distance away.
I had now to learn how to grow a range of food. While Sattar understood the lifecycle of cereals, oilseeds, cattle fodder and other local crops like Til (Sesame), Guar (Cluster Beans) and Sunn (Sunn Hemp) extremely well but he had only a faint idea how to grow fruits and vegetables.
We had to learn through doing, time consuming as it was, and our many mistakes taught us each season. It also taught me patience. I researched which trees would do well in our ecology, and citrus, guava and mango were the choices - these stand validated today. Four groves were planted with fruit saplings in the monsoons of 2012 and 2013, each then a monoculture of one kind of fruit tree. We continued to plough the orchards and plant inter-crops of one kind or another, mainly low-rise lentils that didn’t interfere with the fruit saplings and indeed helped by adding nitrogen to the fruit orchard soil. Fruit trees need caring for the first 3-4 years of their life, and then depending on which variety, the tree lasts from 15 to 50 years. Besides being a stable source of produce, fruit trees are perennial and eliminate the physically demanding cycle of ploughing-sowing-harvesting. Fruit replacing cereal as food is a novel concept without much traction in society, but at a farm replacing cereals with fruits does away with the repetitive cycle of drudgery for the peasant. We were moving towards a via media, one that allowed us to do both.
Cattle
Another key expertise required was cattle, of which I knew nothing. Sattar and the others on the other hand were well versed in cattle rearing, and each of them has a buffalo or more for nutrition at home and for selling milk for additional income. We had to buy them, and we went to the cattle markets of Muzaffarnagar and Karnal I had a production mindset of keeping ‘high-yielding’ Sahiwal cows (from Sahiwal in Punjab) that promise 12-15 kg of milk. I knew vaguely that the mixed breeds – Indian breeds fathered by Jersey and Friesian bulls from Europe - would not be able to handle our ecology, but little did I know that the cows we bought as Sahiwal from cattle fairs were actually significantly mixed breeds. We were stumped for pure Sahiwal semen, and were forced to depend on artificial insemination that simply didn’t work. We even reared a Sahiwal bull for 3 years, but this was too much too late as we lost two of our three gentle Sahiwal cows within the year to unknown diseases before he came of age. That hurt terribly, and we ultimately gave him away too.
It was an expensive experiment. I learnt that local Hariana cattle - with genes that protect them from the heat, cold, winds and diseases of our area - from within a few miles of Aman Bagh provide the best life-cycle investment.
If only we were taught that the first line of defense of time-tested local, herbal remedies; then homeopathic, and finally allopathic as the last line of defense in extreme or life-threatening conditions. But this succession of medication doesn’t work for human health in India with our long traditional of herbal and natural medicine, what are cattle.
Aman Bagh has moved, over these years, to an equilibrium of three desi cows and our pair of bullocks that can be sustained by the green fodder and hay off a portion of our land, and all of these are the Hariana breed that gives less milk (5-6 kg a day in milking period) but rarely fall sick. Instead of focusing on high-input, high-yield revenue, we moved to low-input, low-maintenance. Local won yet again. Thanks to Sagari Ramdas, a veterinary doctor friend with a big heart and deep knowledge, we learnt that balanced nutrition was crucial to cattle health (as indeed for the soil and for ourselves), we learnt herbal medical solutions (feeding all the cattle neem leaves every Friday, neem juice to the new born as de-wormer) as well as cattle homeopathy, and they have responded by not falling sick.
Gobar Gas
Manuring was super critical, and while we spread the dung from our own cattle first, but it was inadequate quantity to build the fertility of our dry, sandy soil. Every family in the villages around have many heads of cattle and buffalo, primarily as the cattle rearing Gujjar and Meo communities are dominant, and I thought it would be a once in a while operation to truck in dung from the villagers who had more than they needed. Not surprisingly, I need to buy and apply dung twice a year.
In 2013 we obtained the service of an old hand at making “Bio Gas” plants, Ramesh Saxena. This 10-cubic-meter floating iron tank ‘Gobar Gas’ plant works flawlessly till today, giving us methane gas to cook food, and slurry that is instantly usable as manure as potentially harmful bacteria have died in the anaerobic heat of the biogas tank.
I read in one thoughtful essay that healthy soil gave birth to healthy plants and trees, and thus no diseases would strike healthy plants if the soil were full of nutrients; quite like humans eating a balanced, healthy, vegetarian diet. This was useful book knowledge, but I didn’t really know how to build soil health as well as I knew to build mine. Neither did I know our sandy soil was so denuded of organic matter that it gave little nutrition to the plant to withstand pest attacks. On testing the soil I saw to my horror that our soil organic matter was a pitiable 0.2%. The gold standard in temperate ecologies is 5-10% organic matter, while tropical and arid soils are in the range of 0.3-2% - our soil organic matter was really not that out of whack. But I was no longer surprised that our plants were not as healthy, it was clear that the soil did not support them adequately with nutrition. I had to make the manuring of the land as an ongoing project, after each crop.
Neither was there a diversity of plants such that natural predators, like the ladybird, would be there to prey on pests. Our less-till, bio-diverse plant environment was yet a few years away. Instead, we made our own organic pest repellants (fermented garlic, chili, cow urine etc.) and micro-biotic soil amendments (fermented dung, urine, lentil powder etc.) learnt from organic farmers from South and West India. We applied these mechanically, and I gradually realised there was no benefit to applying teeming microorganisms on bare soil as the hot sun at 40 plus degrees Celsius kills these microbes immediately. The soil needs to be covered first with protection for the microbes - a layer of biomass to allow the microbes and other flora and fauna to work on eating the biomass and feed the roots of the trees and the crops.
Natural Farming at Aman Bagh
Part III: 2014-2016
Our intensive farm operations continued, alongside a growing understanding of strategic issues. I started to understand the core message from Albert Howard and other natural farming pioneers: the forest is nature’s farm. No one waters the forest, no one manures or fertilises it, no one ploughs it and it is yet such a vibrant natural environment for microorganisms, animals, birds and all kind of plants and trees that thrive for thousands of years. What did natural farmers have to learn from nature’s farm? That ploughing, irrigation, manuring, mono-cropping, and annual plants are over-rated. That trees are the real wonders of nature, and we should embrace them more than we usually do in agriculture.
“Agricultural science has been misused to make the farmer, not a better producer of food, but a more expert bandit. He has been taught how to profiteer at the expense of posterity – how to transfer capital in the shape of soil fertility and the reserves of his livestock to his profit and loss account. In business such practices end in bankruptcy; in agricultural research they lead to temporary success. All goes well as long as the soil can be made to yield a crop. But soil fertility does not last forever; eventually the land is worn out; real farming dies.” Howard, Albert. An Agricultural Testament. 1940
I heard Elaine Ingham, and American microbiologist and soil biology researcher: “Build the biology” she said, “the chemistry will take care of itself”. I started to read up on soil biology (fungi, bacteria, nematodes, arthropods, protozoa) and the symbiosis of plants with these living organisms in the root zones that provide nutrition to each other and food for humans.
Building life in the soil meant the availability of organic matter to provide a welcoming home and food for this biology. It was that simple.
Building Soil Health
“The maintenance of the fertility of the soil is the first condition of any permanent system of agriculture. In the ordinary processes of crop production fertility is steadily lost: its continuous restoration by means of manuring and soil management is therefore imperative.” Albert, Howard. An Agricultural Testament. 1940
Building soil health through the continuous addition of organic matter became my core preoccupation. We started to add copious amounts from multiple sources, making sure it was chemical free. In 2016 alone we added 100 tonnes of diverse biomass to feed the soil. We applied 20 tonnes of our own cattle FYM on the fruit orchards and vegetable plots; purchased 40 tonnes of FYM twice a year for the tilled crop land; 10 tonnes of leaves and branches from trees growing in Aman Bagh; lugged 0.5 tonne of leaf waste from Gurgaon public parks; 0.5 tonne of vegetable and fruit waste from organic wholesaler Isayorganic,; 5 tonnes of sawdust from the village carpenter for deep mulch in all fruit tree basins once a year after the monsoon, and covered the entire floor of all our fruit orchards with 5 tonnes of local Sarkanda grass from the village commons in the winter; the many tonnes of the roots remnants of harvested crops ploughed into the soil and left to decompose; and finally the many tonnes of ‘green manure’ crops.
Through the addition of biomass, manure and compost we have commenced establishing islands of intense soil nutrition in the basins of all our perennial fruit trees, mirroring the primeval forest floor where leaves, trees and animal remains decompose by the action of the microbes and form food for the trees. The tree basins will be expanded as the trees grow, and 10 years from today we would have built extraordinary fertility in the soil of all the ‘no-till’ fruit groves. Our sandy soil would become a marvel of nutrition, exhibiting attributes of alluvial loamy soil.
For our tilled and seasonally cropped land, we ‘green manure’ annually by ploughing in a nutrition-rich, bio-diverse cocktail of grasses and legumes into the soil before they flower, when they are grown to 3-4 feet. This means ploughing in the green manure crops 45 days after sowing and 15 days before planting the main food crop, depending on how much fallow time we have available. This nutrition – Nitrogen, along with micro-nutrients - makes a stunning difference to the growth of the main crop.
The 1,200 litres of microbiology-rich concoction Jeevamrit (applied alternatively every 15 days in fruit tree basins, in the vegetable beds, and in all cropped land) now has a perennial source of biomass, without the sun and wind desiccating them. The application and making of Jeevamrit has become an operational discipline.
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Bonga: a hay storage
structure
Constructed from dried Arhar (pigeon pea) stalks, Khatta
(mulberry) branches and a waterproof thatch roof of dried Sarkanda (grass) hay |
Fruit Trees, Seeds
We started to get comfortable with fruit tree manuring and watering requirements, their crop patterns, and managing fruit pests specially the pesky fruit fly attracted to Aman Bagh by the nearby urban waste landfill of Bandhwari. All the trees were fruiting happily – guava, Kinnow, citrus, mango – and we just had to ensure the harvesting; a harbinger of yet-to-come ‘do-little’ farming. We also planted 100 lemons and 50 Kinnow saplings along an extremely sandy soil patch of 15 feet wide along the periphery of Aman Bagh, and a 30-tree mango orchard in another ¾th acre that will be the fifth ‘fruit-forest’ within Aman Bagh to go till-free and make over 50% of our farm free from the plough.
The Beej Bhandar (Seed Bank) was implemented as a formal initiative in late 2016. We have started storing seeds, carefully sun dried, at one location demarcated by season, kind (fruit, vegetable, cereal, lentil, flowering), and clearly labelled in clean glass bottles. Besides local seeds doing well, we have also seen that saplings grown from seed for perennial trees at our nursery at Aman Bagh do better than those brought from a commercial nursery, and in fact trees grown from seeds planted directly in the Aman Bagh soil are even healthier.
Water
We started to conserve rainwater in 2016 with advice from publications from the Center of Science and Environment in Delhi and started to direct water collected in the monsoon from the roof-top to a reverse bore-well drilled to 70 feet into the underground aquifer. We learnt to build swales along the contour, and bunds to stop the rainwater and enable it percolate into the soil.
We have also ingrained a cultural practice of watering (through our extensive drip and sprinkler irrigation system) only at twilight, and only through the state electricity system never the backup generator. My men now understand the need for ‘wetness’ (nami), and why plant roots don’t need to be drenched in 2 feet of water. A water conservation mentality is a difficult one to give birth to, but when you start the journey it gets better every year.
A key water conservation strategy is to plant ecology-appropriate crops, we thus don’t plant maize, sugarcane, or rice; and none of the Green Revolution water guzzler seed varieties - says, Haryana 711 wheat. We only use desi (local) seeds, for example wheat, pearl millet and sorghum which use much less water compared to Green Revolution seeds. Four fruit orchards are no-till, with a biodiversity of perennial grasses, other plants, bushes and trees which have established cooler micro-environments that reduce water evaporation and the frequency for watering. Finally, fruit tree basin mulching using biomass from flowering trees and sawdust absorbs and retains water for much longer periods and reduces the need and frequency of irrigation by half.
Pests
If we plant the crops at the right time, and in synchronicity with other farms, then pests are spread out over a larger land area and don’t damage our crop appreciably. But when we plant too early or too late, when there are no other fields of that crop for them to feed on, then we face the music as all the birds and insects in our village flock to the picnic!
Our pest management policy has, in general, moved from preventive and scheduled spraying with fermented organic concoctions (cattle urine, chili, garlic, neem leaves etc.) to reactive spraying on specific visual incidence of pests. This organic concoction is simply a repellant, not a destroyer of insects like chemical-based pesticides are. As our soil (and therefore our plants) grows healthier, we expect the incidence of pest damage will reduce. The enhanced plant biodiversity should also give rise to a happy balance of pests and predators. I think I see this already. In some instances, like the fruit fly which is devastating to fruits in the monsoon months and is unaffected by sprays of all kinds in all intensities, we were forced to physically bag the individual Guava and Kinnow fruits with netting bags made at home. It is a lot of labor, which we have in abundance at that time as there is no sowing or harvesting work but works well. And whatever little pests do eat, we let them after all they too must eat
5 Experiential Principles of Natural Farming at Aman Bagh from Albert Howard
- Interdependence of all living things. Work with nature, do not try to dominate it. Apply traditional knowledge and science to maintain the unity of growth and decay. “The forest manures itself”
- Biodiversity of plant (perennial and annual) and animal life is required for the soil food web to thrive. No monocultures. “Mixed crops are the rule”
- Self-sufficiency, with minimal external inputs to the farm. No food, seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, fossil fuels from outside the farm. “Crops and ….[domestic animals] look after themselves.”
- Sustainability. Take only that much out of the soil as one puts back in, make the land and the processes it viable for generations. “The soil is always protected from the direct action of the sun, rain and wind.”
- Local knowledge of soil, crops, seeds, weather, cattle and the people is key
Natural Farming at Aman Bagh: 2017
2017 enabled me move beyond farming operations, as the Aman Bagh systems work smoothly for the execution of our established best practices.
Building the soil has become the fundamental farm strategy and defines our package of practices. Our operations constantly work to protect and grow the soil biology in plant root zones, and we no longer worry about the chemistry (N, P, K and micronutrients) which we are confident will happen in natural course. Scientists say there are enough nutrients locked in all soils for generations, the question is to have enough animal life in there to help release them in a form that is bio-available for the plants. I have started to recognize life as active below the soil as we see it above: the extensive roots talking to each other, the microscopic bacteria, fungi and protozoa that life within these roots in symbiosis, the mites, earthworms, termites, ants, rats and more.
The method to build soil health is through plant biodiversity that feeds directly into microbe and plant health. We have added biodiversity in each fruit orchard by adding 100 Papaya, 200 Moringa, 50 Sharifa (Custard Apple), and a sprinkling of Chiku, Shahtoot (Mulberry), Phalsa (Indian Currant), and hundreds of slips of Khas (Vetiver) grass as ground cover in the fruit orchards. On our cropped land, we are intensifying schemes for multi-cropping, crop rotation, companion cropping, and growing bio-diverse perennial plant life we are seeing healthier plant life.
Our ‘No-Till’ perennial fruit orchards are today 40% of all our land, these will move to 50% by 2019 as our new mango orchard comes on stream: we will further reduce the intensive cycle of till-sow-de-weed-harvest that disturbs soil, oxidises tied-in Carbon, and yokes the peasant to high-intensity labour and Aman Bagh to low revenue annual crops. The biodiverse fruit groves are slowly and visibly enabling the building of orchard soil; and as the fruits are higher priced produce we are moving to a portfolio the generates higher revenue throughout the year.
Agroforestry (a system combining agricultural crops and forest ecosystems) within Aman Bagh is a source of water conservation, provides us cooler and gentler microenvironments, and valuable biomass for mulching. We now allow flowering, evergreen and medicinal trees to grow all over the farm on mends and bunds, their seeds carried and planted by birds, animals and the wind. We have also embraced the practice of pollarding trees (cutting the main trunk at 6-7 feet from ground) as a way to gain mulch. We continue to grow many more evergreen and flowering trees so that no bio-mass needs to come from outside the farm.
The Future
The sustainability challenges that remain are substantial, the first being how to break even. The second is water sustainability in our arid land, where I pump out more water from the aquifers then I put back in. And finally, energy sustainability as we are dependent on the electricity grid.
The outcomes, though, are happily many.
Aman Bagh started with a desire to be in the village and grow local food for myself and my family. That is more than achieved, and I continue to evolve in my understanding of personal health through food as nutrition. I eat as if I were rural west UP in 1959 (the year I was born). The modern consumer economy of supermarket, packaged plenty does not exist for me. My diet is mostly ‘whole plant food’: no animal products including milk or its extracts, (almost) no oils, no juices, no smoothies. My meals comprise local cereals wheat, barley, oats, sorghum and millets, a range of lentils, some nuts, and a profusion of vegetables and fruits. I’m not at all sure if this is right for everyone, but it works for my well-being.
What is been completely unexpected is the deepening of an organic understanding of rural north India, its poverty, contradictions, challenges, and a realisation of opportunities to contribute stuffing my finger in a dike. This engagement with rural life brought me an understanding of traditional livelihoods in the villages, the once dominant handlooms and handicrafts, their decimation by the colonial British and by us brown sahibs who construct taxes to take away even their shrunken present. Understanding the farm and the village, I also see that the state of our environment is deeply connected to livelihoods in inverse ratio as we follow the destructive ways of Rich nation consumerism and the market. I see little hope in a nation with 17.5% of the world’s population and 2.5% of its land, the corporation and the market it sets up even more ubiquitous and all powerful than it ever was, and the single story of urbanisation playing out as the false redemption of mankind. But I am yet driven to look for and create alternative stories, such that the ultimate resting place of our civilisation is not in the city but in another kind of village. Aman Bagh has a bit of that magic.
Over these years, I have become part of a micro-community of the most unexpected companions unlike any I have known in my life as an urban, English-educated, globally travelled, arrogant, self-obsessed man. My early life provided me an identification with the villager; my Muslim and Dalit fellow travellers since 2012 have provided me glimpses into worlds that have opened that third eye. Yes, we can co-exist, we can transform our worldviews and no longer look at the other telling us a 'single story'. ‘Insaniyat, Na Jati, Na Dharm’ .
We were given denuded land, sandy and completely open to the deadly sun, wind and rain; with 100 trees. We have planted 1,400 more trees, and our soil is protected and covered with plants of all kinds and sizes. We have added 250 tonnes of organic matter to our soil, more than we have taken out of it. This enabled us organic certification for our processes, which matters but not that much.
I see well-meaning people – consumer and farmer activists - across India who believe in the redemptive nature of organic food and organic farming, people worried about chemical poisons in all our foods, and how these are connected to the state of our environment. This is an increasing tribe, and a very welcome trend. On the other hand, the ‘organic food’ segment (of the 2% of Indian households who earn more than 50,000 rupees a month) belongs to the same powerful market that works to degrade the land and the environment by selling us jet planes, cars, two-wheelers, oil refineries, tractors, pesticides, fertilisers, hybrid and GM seeds, and packaged foods. There are people in the cities who view organic food as a personal health choice in a very limited sense: they want the chemical-free food, but they don’t want to recognise that their – our - unsustainable consumptive lifestyles are leading to poisoned foods in the first place. Then, there are 60% of India’s peasants and rural labour who farm on rain-fed land, without access to year-round irrigation, and they are ‘organic-by-default’ as indeed all our peasant ancestors were before the ‘Green’ Revolution. The rural poor certainly grow organic food, but they themselves live on the fringes of survival. Finally, there are the 40% irrigated land farmers who have a better life than their rain-fed cousins – but these are fully invested in chemical farming and the aspirational consumerist lifestyle. How do we reconcile these very different groups?
Questions around complex and seemingly unsolvable problems need simple answers to let us slip out from under the overwhelming weight of the present. We should all worry about these problems, but we must also do - for one, start growing our own food without chemicals, and certainly seeking out and actively supporting local chemical-free farmers. So when you visit a farm, which you must, look long and hard at the sun-beaten face of the peasant and realise he and his ancestors have fed us for generations. He might very well yet be uneducated in letters, but he carries the enormous weight of knowledge of growing food for all of us who consume it. He deserves your respect, your compassion, and your money.
Photographs in the post are the property of Harsh Lohit.
