Experiences on my farm journey

 

My journey on our organic farm:

I attended a two-day conference in M.S. Ramaiah college on natural farming by Padmashri Subash Palekar Ji. I got heavily influenced by this and decided to buy a farmland to provide natural food. After searching for couple of years, we finalized on one and bought around 9 acres in Andhra Pradesh.  Its around 115km from my home in Bengaluru. All around the farm there is only chemical farming.  People all around discouraged us from natural farming. There were not many people willing to work/help us as they believe that we won’t make any money.  But we were not the ones to relent. We told them we don’t care about what we get in return for now.  We have jobs and we could sustain for some time. One guy opposite to our farm openly challenged that you see for 10 years and then tell me if any tree grows. I just smiled and thought God will help me in my good endeavor and irrespective of what anyone says, lets move on and good things to do and good things are yet to come.

We kind of had 3 divisions in our land. In the first division, I choose SPNF five-layer farming model.  There are what I put in the five layers.

Mango, Lemon, Amla, Sitaphal, Banana, Moringa, Horse gram.

SPNF 5 layer mango model : 

In the second division, I put the below.

Mango, Chikkoo, guava, rose apple.

For borders, we put mahagony, tamarind, coconut, star fruit, avocado.

Intention to put so many varieties was not to make losses in a single crop and to avoid mono cropping.

Monocropping is growing a single variety. If we grow a single variety , then the soil will be deficient in nutrients as similar plants absorb the same nutrient. Best is to mix different varieties together.

 We also put few exotic /native varieties for our consumption. 

Lakshman  phal,  ram sita phal, litchi, rambutan, rudraksha, soapnut, agase, surinam cherry, dragon fruit, regu pandu, wood apple, mahagony, Malabar teak,  Neem,  Pongemia and  rose wood.

I put a small portion of veggies for our home consumption and that excess I started selling to my friends in our layout. Few people are happy to buy, and few didn’t show much interest. But most of my close friends and relatives were all showing interest in buying the organic produce. The only problem is the transportation costs and the problem of perishability with fresh produce. I am trying to increase my reach for selling my organic produce. 

My husband brings the produce when he goes, but if he goes only to get the vegetables, it would turn out  to be costly as petrol is too expensive.  We enquired about bus service, from a village near by to check if  our care taker can send a bag  by bus and we could collect that from the bus in Bengaluru. We tried it once and it turned out to be reasonable. We were planning to do this more frequently.  Also we started having about new greens which the villagers eat and we started having them too.

How we started.

The land which we bought was chemical farmed before and we had to turn it around to make it organic. Since our main aim was to grow fruits and a little portion of veggies.  Through some contacts, I got one lorry  of good compost from TTD (or probably who take waste from Tirupati). It costed me around 58K for a lorry but compost quality was good. 

              After Lakshmi’s(Lakshmi is our cow) arrival at farm we started making jeevamrutham and applying to plants. We planted  horse gram all around fruit trees for nitrogen fixation. We put Mexican sunflower stems all around so that we can we use the stems for mulching.

To improve the soil quality we put PKM1 & Bhagya varieties of Moringa. PKM1 is used as a good mulch as well.  The growth of fruit trees has been slow compared to the growth of fruit trees at my Bangalore home, and we are only patiently waiting for the trees to grow.

In the second and third division we had land empty our first big crop we planted was 120kg of turmeric. In the remaining land we put toor dal and alasande and averekaya.

Profitability  & Money:

Not to  waste my vegetable produce  I started a small whatspp group, adding few of my friends and posting on a google from, my sale is around 400 to 600rs per post as of now, as my produce is quite small, but I started digesting a truth that money is difficult to come by in farming.

Labour charges are  500 per male and 350 per female per day. For me the external expenditure was only the compost initially and jaggery, horse gram for jeevamrutham and on Lakshmi.  The best model would be to be able to sell directly to consumers to be able to get a fair price for what I grow, but logistics of transport  and distribution make it difficult to sell directly to consumer . Hope someday I can make some profit.

Irrespective of all this, the feelings of enjoying the fresh air from our container, able to just pluck and eat  or  pluck, look at eat what grows in your own farm, enjoying the best in nature is just priceless. The peacock calls in the morning, infinite sky and nature around are just priceless.

Everyone should own a piece of land. Slowly people around also started to understand and respected us for the organic farming which we are trying to do and feeling started sinking in to them “Yes they are for real and they are here to stay and don’t intend to harm anyone with their food produce.”

Water melon, carrot, tomato, beans, muskmelon, corn. These are the cash crops they generally grow nearby. When we sowed turmeric,  few came and appreciated you are growing something which we haven’t grown in this place and we are happy to see that you are introducing a new crop to our area. My only wish is to see if people all around our farm could produce organic/natural so that human race can get rid of all diseases like cancer.

Weather:

Weather is probably a big factor to consider. We had torrent of rains last and this year. There is a lot of water clogging all around. We need to make more trenches for the water and better absorbability needs to be planned.

Arrival of Lakshmi:

Since we follow, ZBNF/SPNF, making jeevamrutham and supplying to plants was essential. We found that a person had naati cow in a village nearby. But coordinating to get urine and dung from that cow and  that  farmer was very difficult. So my husband decided to buy a cow and he selected a beautiful white one. He called me from the farm and said I bought a cow and its on the farm already. I was not ready to settle for any name other than “Lakshmi” for the cow. We don’t have any pets in Bangalore in our home, so Lakshmi was a treat for my children. They fed it bananas, chikkoos  and watermelon. The cow had  beautiful eyes. My children also started to take out her for grazing.  Just before Pongal this year  Lakshmi gave birth to a baby girl. “Pure white” beauty it was. My husband was very excited and he went all the way to the farm to just see the new born. The villagers made fun that you have a girl in your family (both my children are male).  We named the calf Sindhu, Dumbu ( my younger son) is very fond of Sindhu. Whenever Dumbu ran Sindhu used to run behind him.  Jeevamrutham mix supply got set with Lakshmi.  The only disadvantage with having Lakshmi around was that whenever children got a break from online-classes, they used to run to Sindhu and it  was very difficult to bring them back to attend the class after the break 😃

Container:

We bought a container home and placed the container at a height by raising pillars. Most of the villagers were amused at it and we kept getting visitors who wanted to  see how it looks like. We also became famous in the locality for bringing a container home. We went to a nearby lake which was overflowing last year because of rains. A vendor who was selling  condiments  asked us you are the owner who put the container. Me and my husband smiled 😊.

our container below: 

 Government policies:

While what happened in Sri Lanka are lessons to be learned, not to make an abnormal shift to organic or natural farming, the government policies are lopsided. Government still gives subsidy on chemical pesticides and fertilizers. This should go away and organic farmers need a platform for encouragement and sales. Individual private people are able to achieve a lot more by educating and support. Government recent policy to support one crop per district unfortunately promotes monocropping and should be avoided as per me. Mass camps and education are needed to educate farmers on usage of chemicals and their effect on human health and soil erosion and depletion of soil quality because of chemical usage.

Motors and finding depth of water (technology usage).

The only place where technology got used in farming is measuring the depth of water source andwater source it at all any by sending small pen camera sending into the borewell and viewing the camera output in the laptop on the ground and this entire procedure needs to checked in the late night once it is dark and it is completely new to me. Most of the villagers don’t have the smart phones and still use the old kind of phones.

Commission:

My husband rarely used to take cash when he visited the farm.  But he needed it for many works, since many farmers didn’t have smart phones for doing phone pay or google pay. I asked him  how do you manage?  He  said he will transfer via phone-pay/g-pay to another person and he gives in cash if needed. He takes a commission of 1%  for the same. I was baffled by it and there are lot of  middle man who take commission for easy small work. Everyone wants money now and villages are not any  different.

Time:

Time for a software/hardware engineer is very important and every sec matters for go-live or tape-out, often they work as if there is no tomorrow.  Time is at dead-slow in villages. If there is a marriage in the village, the whole village celebrates it and there is no-one available to work as labors. Once the rainy season started we need to wait for ox/tractor to be free. Work which is expected to take a day could often 10-days or more and time is very slow.

Hen and its eggs:

We are vegetarians and 90% vegan now so we don’t have any hen in our land. But my labourer bought hens and he put in our land. Hen lays eggs at the same place on every day and it lays one egg per day. It was amusing to see this for me as it was new experience and we never saw it before. After finishing laying eggs, the mother sits on the eggs and comes out from that place only to eat its food.

 Before you buy:

Check accessibility to the farmland. It helps if you have road access till the farm. If no road access check if the road does not  turn muddy during monsoon and the road is still motorable during monsoon. Check if you have 24hrs electricity line to the farm  or an agriculture one. For agriculture, government supplies only 8hrs per day  to our farm. So if would like to stay at the farm you need to spend additionally solar and inverter ( if you intend to do  WFH or work from farm  or so… etc).

Government provides subsidies based on how much land you have. You are eligible for subsidy if you have less than 5 acres in Andhra Pradesh. DO a split registration on multiple names ( among your family members of course) to avail subsidy.

We realized that our land had a slope or it was low lying compared to other areas bearby and when it rains  Water floods into our farm heavily. We started to put trees in the high areas rather than the low ones.  There were too  much rains in the first year of our planting itself.

My learnings:

Following ZBNF five layer mango model I decided not to even till the  land as I  was  planting trees and it was getting late for planting trees  also ( we planted in august mid). No till and no deweed were done.  Papaya  plants which we bought were small in height  and are difficult to recognize among the tall  plants. Buy fruit plants which are at least 3.5 to 4ft in height if you can when u don’t till the land.

Since we didnt not till and deweed we couldn’t put the nitrogen fixes plants at the right locations. Instead we choose to put horse gram all around  the fruit plants. We put too many and the horse gram climbed the fruit trees, not allowing the fruit  trees to grow. Put just 3 to 4 seeds of horse gram not more.

Five layer model had plants just spaced at 4.5 feet among each other. De weeding is a challenge with that small spacing. Its probably better to change that distance to 9 feet so that the tractor can go in between two plants to dewed or till the land.

Buying with friends

If you are planning to buy with friends,

è please get aligned on your piece of land and his/her piece of land before the registration itself. Please don’t go for combined registration.

è Align on what he/she wants to grow organically or not. There is no point in joining or combining with a friend who doesn’t show interest in organic farming.

è Please discuss all the terms and conditions before the registration itself and also discuss on exit policy if you can.

è How much money each of you want to spend in an year and are you aligned on that ?

W  What crops would you like to grow ? Are you aligned on that ?

è Is it for enjoyment or earning money?  It would be better to discuss on all the things before the registration itself. It would be good for both of you.

My biggest challenges:

          My biggest challenge has been control of weeds till now. I don’t still know what is the best way to manage it.

Tributes/courtesy/gratitudes:

We have just started on our journey and its our first anniversary of plantation of fruit trees on 16^th Aug 2021. We want to convert our land into a food forest in future , waiting for all the fresh produce to come. I would like to THANK all the below people for making it happen. This blog is collection of what I did and what I learnt and what I experienced.

My husband (most of the ground work done by him).

My parents (all the while supporting us)

Ramani mam and Raju garu ( Ramani aunty always supports us with the seeds as we never have time to go out and buy them and Raju garu always gives us tremendous knowledge on equipment and technical specification checking before buying the instruments).

Padma , for helping on how to make google forms and providing all the contacts.

My friends in layout cascading meadows, who are my first customers in buying the small produce whatever we have.

Rajesh Reddy garu, land owner of opposite site, for the moral support and helping us on issues with locals.

Naveen garu, for helping and providing the composting contact.

Rachana Reddy, my guru from where I learnt and continue to learn. I put Mexican sunflowers and lot of mulberry for mulching based on her advise. She continues to educate on multiple things.

Narendra and Bharti, We bought the land together with them , Narendra for all the initial help & Bharti for her sumptuous dishes 

Sohan Shetty sir, for guiding on auger machine and providing the details of organic certification.

Kullayappa, who lives in the next village for providing all the support for bringing the plants, initial manure for the ground preparation, supporting the guidance on entire establishment.

Vijay garu, for providing the guidance on vastu for construing the shed and water tank and cow shed and etc.

Ramana, for helping the construction of sheds with his team and providing all the immediate attention for anything while we live in Bangalore.

Aalam, for helping on our container installation, balcony and additional bathroom construction and making the furniture of our 1BHK beautiful container home more livable.