Farm journey of two years

I officially started as a full-time farmer from 1st Jan 2015 and the two-years journey has been memorable. Learning the nitty-gritties of the farm life has opened my eyes.

I had multiple goals for the first year in front of me...

First and foremost goal being that to prove that farming can be profitable, which failed miserably as we were not yet prepared for that. We realized that the horticulture crops need at least 8-10 years to reach a reasonable level of yield and we need to keep spending on them till that stage is reached. However there is tangible improvement in the situation as our expenses are getting under control and losses are reducing. The intention of proving farming profitable is to encourage rural youth to stay put in their villages and get into farming instead of migrating to cities. I am confident that the day of achieving this goal is not far. In any case it gives immense satisfaction that quite a few local people have found almost regular job at Chiguru Farm and thus are staying put in the village, who otherwise would have migrated to Bangalore.

Second goal was to work on converting the farm into organic continued with more areas under this plan. Achieved partial success in the sense that 90% of the farm is now converted to Organic. Only regret is that we are not able to make the rose patch organic. Although we started off with it as organic, but the rose plants refused to come up and we had switch to the popular tactics.
(Update from June 2017: We removed the rose plants completely and using the space for growing vegetables. This makes Chiguru Farm completely organic now).

There was a need to speed up the agri-tourism infrastructure setup. This got ready in an year's time and we successfully launched agri-tourism on Jan 1, 2016. The experiences in this sector definitely qualify an exclusive blogpost which will come soon. 😀

Started off 2015 with harvesting a good lot of banana bunches on Day1, when the prices were reasonably good. Sitting in front of a pile of green banana bunches - some of them weighing upto 65kgs - was a sight to behold and the excitement and feeling of satisfaction cannot be explained. Mango and litchi trees had started flowering by then and the aroma of those flowers was intoxicating. A few months later the banana price crashed to an extent where cutting them and selling became more expensive than leaving them to monkeys. Coconut price also remained at the ground level for more than one year. Reasons were vague and non-comprehensible. And there were untimely rains in Apr/May 2015 impacting the mango crop although we celebrated that our rain-water-harvesting ponds overflew!!! Later in Nov 2015 Chennai floods once again our rain-water-harvesting ponds overflew and the farm was resembling Malnad region of Karnataka. Then suddenly there was no rain for several months after that, resulting in a drought year in 2016. We hardly had 3 decent rains in the year.  Many times it was frustrating not being able to water the plants due to non-availability of power despite having sufficient water, as some of the trees started drying up. (This can happen only in India as the central govt. is about to declare availability of surplus power in India, but most of the farmers are suffering from load-shedding). I started understanding the ground realities of farming and what leads farmers to distress.

Visits to organic, non-organic and natural farms in last two years helped me understand the differences in techniques and good and bad things about each of them both from farmer and consumer perspective. Worth mentioning are Sukrushi Farm of Greenpath (near Nelamangala), Navadarshanam, Mr. Santhanam's Sankarshan Farm at Therubeedi (close to Chiguru Farm) and Savayava Krishi Parivar's head office near Tirthahalli. Each of them has loads of tales to tell and picking-and-choosing good and suitable practices was real fun. Experiments with organic farming with different approaches, practices, manures, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. go on and on and on. Some things worth mentioning here are vermicomposting, honeybee boxes, jeevamrutha, navamrutha, percolation pits and mulching.

Timing and long-term planning is extremely critical for farming, particularly in a horticulture farm. If we need certain kind of income after 5 years, we need to plan for it now and implement it at the right time. The right time could be either the time of monsoon or the time at which the market price will be better or something else. Marketing itself is another aspect which is crucial, which most of the farmers ignore and many of them can't even afford.

The natural surroundings, clean air, greenery, birds, animals and insects, the hard work involved, the joy of each plant flowering and fruiting - everything is unique and unparalleled in a farm. Add the long-term socio-economic changes it would bring into the local lives. Irrespective of the returns it offers, farming indeed is a fulfilling experience in itself.