Future is in "Love for Farming" - Day #4 (28 March 2020) - 21 day #Covid19 Lock down

Day #4 (28 March 2020)

Future is in “Love for farming”

Three years ago we moved from the city to a village. Valiyavila in Karakulam is a peri-urban village, near to Trivandrum, and retains a lot of characters of a midland hilly Kerala village. But affluence is also here, mainly due to people migrating for work to the Gulf, bringing back money and investing on that sole gratifying act – building a mansion for their rather small family to live. One of the first things we noticed when we brought the 21 cents of land, four years back, was the land people in our neighbourhood lived in. Each family had a house, anything between 25 cents to an acre or more and it was rubber trees all over. Here and there, negligently, a jackfruit, a wild jack, coconut and mahogany trees could be seen. Even Mango trees were missing. The seasonal - Plantains, Banana and Tapioca were the only food crops a few of them were seen to cultivate, some were consumed; most were sold to the local shops. The hilly terrain - laterite and granite, and rubber plantations, small but very decisive ones overrode everything else.

Inspite of such a lot of land with the local community, we missed seeing anybody growing vegetables for their household needs, not even a papaya tree could be found in most homesteads. Most of the families were dependent on the markets and shops for vegetables. It has always intrigued me as to why people do not use their available land for cultivation. The probable reason is that they never felt like doing so. After all, money must be coming in from some hard working people at home or from the middle-east, and whatever was needed was available in shops.

When we started living here, we were cultivating vegetables, plantains, banana, tapioca, various yams and so on. We also planted a number of trees including mango, jackfruit, pomegranate, gooseberry, java apple, papaya, neem, drumsticks, coconut and many other flowering plants and trees. We even have two large vines of passion fruit. We called our home Vasantham. Most of the trees are very young and nowhere near flowering or fruiting, but we live with the hope of seeing them soon.

The Covid19, and the subsequent lock down of the country, has pressed the panic button in most households now. It is only 4 days into the lock down, and we are already seeing the scurry for buying and stocking vegetables and grocery. Shops open for reduced timings, and its a rush at these times. Kerala is surely managing the crisis much better than the rest of the country, but even here the heat is beginning to be felt. As the crisis intensifies, as has happened in most nations ( and I pray it doesn’t !), food supply would be affected and this will be the first priority that families, communities and the State would have to address on a war footing. Are we, as a people, ready for the long haul ? Can we not kick start an intensive drive to begin cultivation of whatever food crops we can and prepare for the worst ?

Two questions that I am always on the look out for answers is - How much land do we need to produce enough vegetables and fruits for our own consumption, and Why are most of us doing nothing with the land we have ?

Bindu and Bejoy are a wonderful couple and great friends of ours. Bindu studied with me in college. They are both Scientists(Engineer) at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, and are right now leading a voluntarily retired life, after nearly three decades of active employment. They have two children, both grown up. They live in the city in a medium size house on an 8 cent plot. Bejoy has always been very passionate about farming, and maintains a well cared kitchen garden in his 500 sq ft roof-top. He produces most of the local vegetables, and some exotics as well. From their garden, they get varieties of brinjal, ladiesfinger, tomato, chillies, bittergourd, palak, spinach, cluster beans, clove beans, ash gourd and many more.

In the first week of March, the unforeseen happened to them. Their family had to go into a self-quarantine at home, owing to their son who returned from Japan. Fortunately for them, they are all safe and healthy. The best part of this story is described by Bindu in a comment she shared with all our classmates. “...it was all so fast that we could not even visit a shop and prepare for quarantine... So the first thing was consuming all we had in store..even now we are able to survive on that...also our terrace garden was in the peak production and self reliance in vegetables is achieved... except for onion and chilly... also potato. Also two jackfruit trees yielding more than I can handle...”. This was two weeks through the quarantine. Today, when we were talking over the phone, Bejoy answered my query - this 500 sq ft roof-top garden, if well taken care, could easily produce all their local vegetable needs, except those onions and potatoes, for most part of the year. With some little more care and luck, they could drag through the rainy months as well.

This was a very inspiring story to all of us. Many of us regularly talk about the resilience that families must have at the way things are unfolding in our world now. And one of the most important part of the new learning is the “Art of Farming”, farming for our own food. This is not only for self-reliance, but for the joy of it. To see ones own land tended, ones own plants yielding the fruits of nurturing, and the joy of eating what one produces. For many, this is also money saved.

Sini is a farmer in Kovalam, who is a regular supplier of certified local organic vegetables to the Organic Bazaar in Jawahar Nagar, a social enterprise run by the voluntary group Thanal, which I am associated with. Sini lives in just 3 cents of land, and her house has a nearly 750 sq ft roof top. She is an intensive vegetable farmer, and uses that little space to cultivate enough vegetables for their need and to earn anything between Rs 4000 to 10,000 every month.

If you think Bindu’s and Bejoy’s joy in their kitchen garden is simply an exercise in love for farming, then Sini’s is an exercise in livelihood, and both carry the essentials of the future, that no Covid19 can take away from us.