After six years behind the desk at an IT job, Vinoth Kumar left it all to become a farmer. Hailing from an agricultural family based in Cheyyur, Kanchipuram district, the 32-year-old has been a full-time farmer since 2014, practising sustainable living and organic farming methods — teaching other farmers to do the same. While he has travelled extensively and studied the traditional farming methods of Tamil Nadu and other places in India, Nepal and Bhutan, his latest project will take him across 11 countries in South East Asia.
“When I went around TN to document organic farming methods, I found that most of them have been lost over the passage of time. It seems virtually impossible to do agriculture in India without electricity. However, in countries like Laos and Vietnam, that are still not very developed, they still follow a lot of traditional methods. We are planning to cover around nine to 11 countries to document these,” says Vinoth. The countries to be covered include Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan.
Since the SE Asian countries also experience tropical climate and similar materials are available, studying their methods might help farmers in India revert to traditional farming, feels Vinoth. “Since this kind of knowledge is not documented properly, we are trying to collect and document it in a video format. We already have a YouTube channel, where we share sustainable farming and living methods. We will add subtitles, and share these with our partner organisations across the country. They will be able to do a better job of translating them into the native language and educating farmers.”
Vinoth will be accompanied by Raja S. Pandian, who has travelled with him on several earlier occasions. “We became friends on Facebook, and since we had common interests, we began travelling together. For travellers, it is that simple and easy to become friends,” says Vinoth with a laugh. They plan to cycle and hitchhike most of the way to spread the message of eco-friendly travel, and are currently looking for sponsors. In a recently concluded indiegogo crowd-funding drive, they raised USD 4000 out of the USD 9500 they estimated they would need for the nearly six-month-long trip.
Of his expectations from the journey, Vinoth says, “The trip will be a learning experience for us, and a chance to create a rich repository of open source documentation that will be freely accessible to everyone who is interested in making the world a better place.”
