of chick peas, mustard & Goethe …

It’s difficult to say if Goethe was named after this plant or if this plant was named after Goethe….

Probably there is no connection between either of them. Here in the farm some of the Goethe plants are flowering & they do look gorgeous… isn’t it?

This years chick peas or “kalla channa” has been average

One good thing happened vis-vis chickpeas growing & i.e there was no infestations of pod borers & cut worms (unlike last year, when they had completely finished off our crop).

May be things are improving & becoming more complex vis-a-vis the soil, but i am not yet qualified to answer them. If there are no infestations in the coming years then we can conclude that the soil health is improving & plants are becoming healtheir etc.

But there is a surprise element in having a crop without infestations & it is a very petite & beautiful natural predator in the form of a few Pied bushchats which have been flitting in & out of the field & doing the de-worming job for us…….fantastic !

I wonder how one can thank them…. any ideas ?

meanwhile some mustard flowers in the wheat fields are forming into seeds.

Each pod has about 10 seeds

each branch has about 25 pods

each plant has about 25 branches….

peace & luvre… with a sarson ki tadka !

wheat harvest coming up…..

i.e in a couple of weeks…..

This is a snap of one of our wheat fields from top of our land.

On the graph of progress towards growing our own food, we made a few steps forward. Last year was the first time i had planted wheat & i had done many mistakes, starting from the choice of seeds, the method of planting, the irrigation methods, everything was plain pathetic. Making a note of the mistakes helped & this year fortunately the wheat is looking better. 

This year we were also lucky in our search to find good seeds (Samba/Emmer wheat) & the germination was good. Then there were many hiccups (especially with irrigation) in the last couple of months, it was like a decathlon race … we tumbled & we stumbled & we kept falling down but somehow we kept pulling ourselves up & managing to stand up & dust ourselves & now finally we are in sight of the finish line…..

But in two weeks time that there will be a dramatic change in colours from this deep green to amber when the straws will go completely dry. And then to test the crop, we’ve to rub the wheat head between our fingers and chew on a piece of grain. If the grain cracks in our mouth and becomes soft as you chew, it is ready to be harvested.

Inshallah !!

growing Oats & other stories………….

Recently Anand posed these questions : Out of five vital questions in Natural Farming  three are very important to be answered before growing anything :

1. Why to grow? (or for whom to grow?)

2. What to grow?

3. How much to grow?

only the following two questions have a definite answer

4 When to grow? Ans : as per nature’s calendar and

5 How to grow? Ans : in tune with the Nature.

The first three questions needs some mulling over…..

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About a month back while chatting with a friend, she said i am sending you some Oat seeds…. please do try it…. so  that is how my tryst with Oats began. So now we are not only growing but also trying out various recipes (not just porridge…but gnnochi’s, even dosa’s & idli’s) & infact i found my son really enjoying it. (btw he is my official taster, when i see him enjoying something which i’ve made, then i know its good stuff).

Anyone passing by our farm assumes that this is wheat, then someone would’ve told them that; it actually isn’t wheat…. then they will sit over a bidi & have a discussion…. what could this be, no one has heard of Jau, they assume it is Sattu, but they come the conclusion that this grass is a fantastic fodder crop & the grains are very poushtik (nutritious). So one day i asked an older gentle man do you know what is this ? he replied that around 30 years back he had seen some farmers in Wai area growing this for cattle feed !

I wonder why these days Oats are selling at almost Rs 140/- per kg

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Now coming back to the first three questions

Why to grow or for whom to grow : i guess we grow things for ourselves (family & friends, animals & all the birds, reptiles & insects who are all living on the land)

What to grow : i would like to grow all the things (grains, pulses, cereals, spices, vegetables, meat, firewood, construction material & all that we consume & use…..

& How much to grow : actually would like to grow everything in abundance, as of now our farm is only one tier. In the coming year we should progress to a second tier & then over the years hopefully we will go all the way to seven tier farming

ojalá

saying good bye to flood irrigation…..

well almost !

This is our second year with the winter crops of Wheat, Chickpeas, Ground nuts & a very interesting new introduction this year : Oats. We’ve been watering the fields with our diesel pump & its been a pain to say the least, something or other keeps giving way & it’s really become high maintenance & a nuisance. So slowly the diesel pump is on its way out & the solar pump has taken over. Its been working like a dream, so along with the installation of the solar pump….. in came thoughts about installing drip irrigation. I had always thought drip irrigation to be an expensive proposition. But i have never been a fan of flood irrigation either. Not only about amount of water been used, also because flood irrigation does not allow any mulching & soil building activities along with the crops, so for a farmer like me who is not using any chemical inputs on the land, trying to grow something without mulching & soil building is an absolute crime. So while we were installing our solar pumps, we were discussing all this with Vivek & Arjun, it was they who suggested to go for Driptech.

Conventional drip irrigation costs about 40k per acre & somehow it was not convincing enough & plus it’s simply unaffordable for small plot farmers like me, whereas Driptech costs about 10k an acre & it is much more flexible in its installations….

So one day we decided to take the plunge & we did a trial with just one roll of pipes to see how it works.

This driptech eliminates many parts from the conventional drip irrigation system (including conventional electricity, since driptech runs on gravity !) and also this micro-irrigation system provide highly uniform water application even with low pressure. So we can connect it directly to the solar pump, plus we have an option of connecting it with our storage tanks. Once we installed the pipes & when we were going through the pros & cons of it, Vivek was mentioning ….this seems to be history in the making, by the look of things this farm seems to be the first to do irrigation with a combination of Solar pump & drip irrigation ! 

But there is an interesting story behind this company called Driptech. Infact drip irrigation is not a new technology, but up until now it has been out of reach for the nearly 600 million small-plot farmers in the developing world.

Peter Frykman, just 26 years old & the CEO of Driptech, while studying mechanical engineering in Stanford University went to Ethiopia as part of the course called “Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability’.  Frykman specifically worked on looking at irrigation solutions for small-plot farmers. The product and the manufacturing technology that he developed out of this course and out of his experience in Ethiopia really started with looking at the needs of the small holder farmer.

The irrigation system that Frykman developed requires none of the expensive emitters necessary for larger scale irrigation operations, which enables the company to price its product at two to five times less than a typical commercial system. Driptech also says that on average farmers realize 30% to 70% in water savings and recoup their initial investment in less than six months.

How it works

The Driptech Irrigation System provides small-plot farmers with specially designed drip irrigation tubing, take off valves, grommets and a filter. So a small-plot farmer first rolls out the irrigation tubing, which delivers a uniform flow of water to crop roots via precisely punched holes (sold in rolls of 200 meters in length). The farmer then attaches a takeoff valve to the irrigation tubing to enable him/her to control the area of land that he/she wants to irrigate. The farmer uses the grommets to connect the takeoff valve to the PVC pipe that delivers the water from it source. A filter with a mesh-type screen filter to purify the water prior to irrigating crops is connected between the water source and the PVC piping. The irrigation system can be scaled accordingly depending on the size of a farmer’s field.

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So from Stanford to Ethiopia & now to our tiny hamlet called Pishwi, viola a new window of opportunity opened…..

introducing some chickens in the farm….

I’ve been itching to introduce some birds (ducks, turkeys & chickens) in the farm & finally the other day got a pair of local breed chicken. Rough estimation of this variety suggests that they lay about 45 eggs a year & need i say that they do provide very tasty meat, plus they also do their bit in pest control & of course their droppings improve the fertility of soil in the farm. Anyway those issues can be known to us only in the coming few months. Now in fact the first question which comes to me is whether we should let them free in the farm or keep them confined to a coop ?

As of now, they are free, will figure out over time what type of enclosure is the best, once they start laying eggs & when we have some chicks. When there are chicks, then the hovering Kestrels can swoop down on them any moment, then of course in the night they will need protection from predators like snakes & foxes. As of now, they are free during the day & come back into their bamboo baskets during dusk. But the most important aspect for me is to learn how to provide a healthy environment for these birds to live, free from all mites & making sure that they do not fall ill, by providing the right vaccines at the right time or may be we will be able to administer homeopathic medicines if required.

They of course will mess around with the mulch, their hunger is insatiable, we need to evolve a good diet, with a proper amount of grains & proteins, so that one can see them sitting quietly for a while & not foraging all the time. Thankfully we do not have much vegetables growing in the farm (as of now it’s basically the field crops like wheat, chick peas, ground nuts & oats), so the mulch is not intensive as it would be, but come March again it will be a new challenge, with the fields covered with mulch…. but by then we would’ve been able to work out a chicken tractor design……

preventing the extinction of silence

It’s not easy to find silence in the modern world. A quiet place is one where you can listen for fifteen minutes in daylight hours without hearing a human-created sound.

If we can protect the silence of even an inch, in effect we will be protecting the natural sound scape of approximately one thousand square miles of surrounding land. It’s a first step toward the goal of preventing the extinction of silence. 

Anyone who has felt the oppression in a classroom or boardroom or marriage when only some are free to speak will understand what it means to be silenced—to have no voice, to be seen and not heard, to be told to “pay attention,” which means do not pay attention to any voice but one.

Silence creates an opening, an absence of self, which allows the larger world to enter into our awareness. It brings us into contact with what is beyond us, its beauty and mystery.

Silence is not the absence of sounds, but a way of living in the world—an intentional awareness, an expression of gratitude, to make of one’s own ears, one’s own body, a sounding board that resonates in its hollow places with the vibrations of the world.

I am absolutely at home in silence, these days i cannot take the noise, the unnecessary talk. I like to keep expressions simple, through the eyes, through the warmth of my body, through the strength of my arms, through a smile. Breaking the silence is only a last resort if all the above failed.

One of the observations which comes from mostly anyone who visits our farm is about the silence in the area. I used to hate the sound of our diesel pump & it really used  to create a ruckus and now that is been replaced by a solar pump & one of the first things which stuck me while watching a solar pump function was the fact that it works absolutely silently.

Here is Vivek & Arjun installing the solar panels…..

Just keep the panels facing the sun & put on the switch….. water comes gushing out, its such an amazing technology. Actually these two solar panels will produce 400 watts of electricity, which is good enough to run a house hold, apart from pumping water. Its just a beginning, lets see how it goes.

Here is some basic details of what we’ve installed:

The Solar pump :

It runs on 48V DC power and can pump water to a head of 15m or 49ft @ 2000 ltrs per hour.

If there is excess voltage the pump trips automatically. It is better to avoid this from happening.

At the bottom of the pumps is a filter which can be opened and cleaned. The black cap at the bottom needs to be unscrewed and the filter cleaned. An external mesh fitted would be easier to clean and help reduce this problem

The pump should not be switched on, in low light conditions of morning and evening.

The pump should have a maintenance free life of at least 20,000 hrs.

The Solar panels:

At present we have connected two 200W panels. Presently they give a voltage of 59V due to high voltage the pump trips, so it has been partly shaded with green cloth.

The panels should be aligned close to perpendicular towards the sun for best performance. Care should be taken while moving the panels, wires should not get stretched. This could break, loosen connections, cause short circuits and damage pump and panels.

As the temperature of the panel goes up the the panel performance will drop. During summer afternoon one may need to remove the shaded portion to keep up the performance.

Wipe panels with soft wet cloth daily too keep off dust.

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If any reader wants to harvest the sunlight falling on their land in this form, please be free to contact Vivek: vivek.mundkur@gmail.com or Arjun : arjunmundkur@gmail.com

ciao !!

check dam, water storage & power solutions…

Along with planting wheat another major task undertaken was to build a check dam on the river so that we can harvest the water.

So this is our water storage till June 2012

Looks good, doesn’t it? However, it is getting more expensive each year. Last year it costed around 3K, though it did break a couple of times and we spent some more on repairs. This year with increased costs stopping the water has costed us 6k.

We certainly cannot be doing this every year, we need to work out alternatives. One idea that comes to mind is to blast the river bed at different places during the summer so as to deepen it into a rock pool.

Necessity is the power of invention. In my case there is no power to invent but necessity does make me go & find the right people. Thanks to Nitya again, I was introduced to a genial genius of a man Lt Col. Vivek Mundkur retd. After a just brief conversation over the phone, I was delighted  to see him walking into our farm within a few hours .

He made various suggestions re. finding alternative solutions for power for our house and pump & for low-cost drip irrigation etc.

With diesel prices at almost Rs 50/- per ltr,  me carrying a 20 ltr can, 65 kms to & fro to run our diesel pump seems a bit crazy doesn’t it ?     Recently, I waited for over 3 hours to meet the chief Engineer in MSEB regarding our grid connection and had to leave without meeting him.  And here after just a brief conversation over the phone, Vivek just bikes down to our farm with clear uncomplicated suggestions/options/solutions on how to harvest energy from the sun. But i am not going to take my foot off the pedal to get the grid connection.

Coming back to Vivek, we’ve  agreed to a trial  of the solar pump (that’s the best part, if the pump does not work he will refund my advance payment). We will only know when we start using it whether it will be able to irrigate our wheat fields etc.  but it’s surely going to be an interesting period ahead….

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Peace, love & remembering a couple of them who made our youth so memorable in our quest to be free & in our celebration of freedom & in our romance with life !!

Without doubts our inspiration during our golden run in soccer while in college, to the one who sparked off our imagination, especially while in MCC , the indomitable Socrates. (a tribute here). Today i can only do a failing reminder to my son, who loves soccer, that nobody in today’s soccer comes even close to Socrates as a player & as a person.

& of course for all of us who become cynical & slow down as we age -yet there was this man, a person who had to express himself, throbbing with ideas, wanting to meet new people & continue taking risks all his life, & to my 84 year old father who refuses to come to our farm….. Dev sahab, a tribute here & another

tears & adios !

getting introduced to permanent agriculture

I love driving & usually have immense stamina to drive hours at a stretch. However, the driving this month did push me out of my comfort zone. There were pending plumbing issues,  running around to nail the MSEB guys for electricity connection & a long pending & painful issue to get an access road to the farm. When I am driving I love to listen to music but its been really frustrating to deal with the MSEB guys or even just getting the right people together to get the access road done. My mind was not at ease to enjoy music & the long drives were getting a bit tedious. I was also getting agitated with myself….. till finally i told myself that I needed to calm down..

But as it always happen with me, when i am down in the dumps….. usually i get directed towards something better & that’s exactly what happened. I tell you there is some method in the way the universe functions. When friends had come, Salil had suggested that all resources of the land should be on top of the land (uphill) & not below (downhill). He mentioned that for eg: here your water source is below the land & now to irrigate the land you are pumping water uphill, storing it on top & then bringing it down below etc in the process somewhere a synergy is lost….. so he suggested me to explore possibilities of exploring (rain)water storage uphill…..

Well… he did get me thinking & i had started looking up stuff to read & understand these concepts…… then i bumped into podcasts on permaculture so i downloaded them on to my pen-drive to listen to while driving. Suddenly the 3 hour drives again became not only fun but something to look forward to. I realised that there is a whole world out there to be learned & unlearned, especially after hearing about the author of Rebel Farmer, Sepp Holzer. He did not learn his techniques by reading theories out of a book. He learned through direct observation and experimentation with nature.

Here is a bit of what he says :

…….a natural form of agriculture that is based on one’s work with the cycles and interactions in nature. ! A business in harmony with nature is not only ecologically correct, it can also be economically very successful ”Learn to speak with nature, they learn to estimate correctly. Natural thinking, living and working is not only the basis of management, it’s an attitude that runs through all areas of life and exclude nothing. It’s about accepting responsibility for our contemporaries and for all living beings with moral courage and stand up for the preservation of a livable world! It is necessary to be ahead, to think ahead, instead of chasing all criticism. ”ask your land, your water, your animals, whether they feel good under your guidance.” 

Suddenly i feel i am thrown out of a hole or something. There is so much to do on the land like developing patios, planting by the hill and understanding more about raised beds, water gardens, ponds, humus retention basins, dry and wet habitats, micro climate zones, agroforestry (integration of trees and shrubs in agricultural use), fishing, aquatic breeding, animal husbandry, may be introduce some ducks into the river, chickens for sure and grow lots of medicinal herbs. And as Salil said particular emphasis should be placed on the hydrology of the landscape, because water is life!

One of Sepp Holzer’s  important component is the regulation of so-called “pests” – the regulation of populations of organisms causing harm. It’s about developing self-sustaining systems, a “symbiotic” land management that allow each individual to design his personal survival strategy……..

He also warns never to do something exactly the same as it was done somewhere before, but start small and experiment to learn what works best where you live.

He also never mentions his yields, he doesn’t keep those figures,  he grows so much food that he harvests what he needs and lets the rest go back to nature……

The other day i had gone to meet Nitya about introducing chickens & she was also convincing in her thoughts, when she said  do try & catch energy resources as high in the landscape as possible among many other principles of permaculture which she shared with me.

Well, as a concept or as a theory it sounds really convincing, but how will we put it in praxis is going to be a challenge. For eg: apart from the river water, we also have a geo thermal borewell with a present water level at a depth of 16.4 ft, which is also situated in the lower rungs of the land.

Lets see how things evolve in the coming months !

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Btw whats the job of the farmer ??

The job of the farmer is to grow good soil !!

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Peace, love & keep creating humus.

the samba (b)wheat…

It’s been one hell of a month……. “naa khushi, naa dukh” (neither happy, nor sad!)

Harvesting rice, threshing it & finally the milling….. phew, finally its all over & done with.

Firstly, there is a bit of joy in bringing home a sack(s) full of rice. Secondly, the learning from mistakes (about seeds, about tilling, about transplanting etc) has been immense & that’s giving me some confidence to unlock a few more codes in my attempt to embrace this land…

Immediately after the harvest we prepared the fields for Wheat, Channa (chick peas) & Mustard. Simultaneously the fence had to be reinforced & we had to check the water in the river. We needed to organise irrigation for the wheat crop too!

I also remembered the pathetic wheat seeds that i had got last year, some friends who are  experts in the field of local seed varieties had told me to hunt for Khapli wheat & had warned me not to buy wheat seeds from the market. I went asking to all the limited contacts that i have for wheat, all to no avail. Finally i went to a seed shop where the owner is a friendly sort and asked him … look sir… i am interested in Khapli wheat so can you get me 20 kgs  from a farmer ? He said he will try & asked me to call him back after 2 hours. I promptly called him after a couple of hours & he said a farmer from Sangli has sent it by ST parcel service & he will collect & keep it for me !!

So yes, its something really positive to look forward to & here are some details of this variety :

1. Emmer wheat, commonly known as Samba wheat or “Khapli,”  (Triticum dicoccum) is found to have curative properties for treating diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Its capacity to lower blood glucose and lipid levels and high temperature stress tolerance compared to other cultivated species makes it therapeutic.

2. It is believed to be developed from T. diccoides Koru (a wild form). It is grown in southern India, i.e., Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka. It is also grown in Spain, Italy, Germany and Russia.

3. Its only 2% of the total wheat grown in India.

4. Supposedly has more fibre content than normal wheat & organic shops which sell this wheat has price tags of Rs 100/- per kg !

5. Emmer wheat, due to hard and vitreous nature of its grains, milling quality is very superior especially for semolina preparation. Semolina of this wheat needs less cooking time and has more cooking tolerance.

Among all the above…. the fact that its grown only by 2% of the farmers  sparked off something which i’ve wanting to do for a while i.e to have a seed collective in our farm. There are so many varieties of rice, wheat, pulses & vegetables which are systematically gunned down by the seed companies. There has been enough written, talked & debated about it so here on the farm we are dedicating a plot of land to be a seed bank. Already about 8 varieties of rice have come in & would you believe it we are growing rice again this winter to reproduce these seeds !

My hands are itching with hope & excitement because we will be doing direct planting of rice, plus it also be our first venture into clonal propagation, something which one has heard so much from Dr Richharia, so its going to be a complete dress rehearsal & learning for us now, before we plant rice again next monsoon. Just as Prof Dabholkar always used to exhort us…. plant, uproot, replant, measure, observe, take notes, become the master…..

peace, love & more dress rehearsals !!

taking the good & the bad together…

Recently a friend had come visiting ….

& after walking around, talking & discussing about how we found this land & the time & effort that had gone in to find something which we liked etc- he said…. it looks good, you seem to have found a nice nesting place. After a year & half on the land, what do you think are the negatives of this place ?

He got me thinking, so here we go with what i feel are the negatives of this place :

1. Even though i am a very quiet type & like to just be in some corner, but the truth is that i like to be among friends (even if it is in a quiet corner!!). I miss the fact that there are no friends close by where one can just drop in, help with some farming, cook together, have a meal together & share a laugh or a few tears around a fire-place.

2. Another big negative is that something is missing in the soil. I came here with my experience of farming in coastal Maharashtra & South Gujarat yet it seems like a different world even though it’s just 300 kms away. After Prof. Dabholkar helped us crack a few codes,  growing fruits & vegetables was a pleasure. Whereas it’s not happening here as of now. There are many factors involved like the heavy rainfall, different climate & humidity levels, a different PH, me not on the land on the continuous basis & many more codes to be decoded. Our earlier place was just a plain rectangular piece of land where basic amenities came with the land. Here this place involves so many contours which requires a clear Perma culture based design, basically we are starting from scratch.

3.  Accessibility is also a huge minus. Not in terms of distance from Pune as that we knew very well from the beginning what we were getting into. The drive is not exactly on a F1 track !!  For digging a bore well we could not get the big vehicle because it wouldn’t climb the ghat. Even when we agreed upon a small one we still had to pay for a back up jeep.  When we take the plunge into house building then its going to be the same. Truck drivers can make a fuss when they know they have two ghats to climb. Even for farming related activities like bringing long irrigation pipes or some cow/goat dung etc is not impossible but it is expensive. Public transport is also practically non-existent with just one late evening bus coming into our village.

4. We have to weather this period of land speculation too. The land agents are a mafia…. lots of buying & selling is going on in the neighbouring villages so one actually doesn’t know how this landscape is going to evolve in the next ten years. Hopefully it will settle down by then & the land mafia will go jobless.

I really cannot think of any more negatives. Partner may have a few more to add but i feel things can only improve from here on, it can’t get worse….

When Arvind was here, one morning, we took a walk behind our farm……

Brilliant views up there…. so i guess as in life where we take the good & the bad together…. it’s the same with this place.

Infact this place is our life !!