“I’m tending to my cows. Can you call me later?” asks farmer Jaishankar. We hang up, hoping for a chat with him later — we don’t know much about him, except that he gave up his job in the city to turn organic farmer, as have many youngsters like him. Some head straight to the fields during the weekends after a week of slogging at the laptop for work. Here, they touch and smell earth, feel sweat trickle down their brows as they tend to their crops, listen to the wind, and taste life in its purest form. From former techies to MBA graduates and architects, their numbers are rapidly increasing.
It has been a month since R. Sathish Kumar quit his job at Amazon to become a full-time organic farmer. He grows vegetables, coconuts, mangoes, and greens on a leased 12-acre plot at Pavunjur village in Kancheepuram. “Farming is risky business,” says Sathish. “Our work revolves around the most unpredictable of resources — rain. We have to be on our toes and constantly improvise our methods.”
Sathish says that to be a successful farmer, one requires more skills than for a corporate job. “We have to be creative, and plan well according to the season. For me, every day as a farmer is a learning experience.” Sathish runs an organic shop on ECR where he sells his vegetables and other products he gets from reliable sources.
“My last day at work was August 15,” he smiles. “It was as though I found freedom from the kind of life I didn’t want to lead.” He is developing an online shopping site for organic food. “Customers will simply have to place the order and it will be delivered to them,” he says. “I want to create a model where organic food is affordable,” he adds.
IT professional M.E. Thyagarajan, who is starting an organic-farming venture with five business partners, mentions terms such as “automated drip-irrigation” and “farm operations manager”. He is integrating ideas from IT into farming. He sees organic farming as an “appreciable investment” that will give profits of “lucrative value”. This is because he feels “people are willing to pay for non-contaminated food”. Once business picks up, Thyagarajan hopes to completely switch to farming.
R. Surya, an architect, stopped practicing after she decided to live off the produce from her three-acre farm a little beyond the city. “I want to do something for the environment,” she says. “Look at what we’ve done to it — there’s actually no ground water in ECR and OMR. I’ve been part of the construction of many buildings on those stretches. I feel responsible,” she says. “And so, one day, I quit.”
Surya leads a quiet and peaceful life at her farm. She’s constructed the kind of home she always wanted to build for herself — from reclaimed wood, eco-friendly naatu odu , and red-oxide flooring. “We produce zero waste. Everything is reused — our food waste goes into our farm,” she says. She grows paddy, toor dal, urad dal, greens and vegetables.
One day, M. Dinakar, an AIR announcer who was struggling to make a name for himself in the movies, decided to stop everything he was doing and become a farmer. It all began after attending a workshop under Subhash Palekar, a well-known organic farmer. Today, Dinakar lives by himself at his five-and-a-half acre farm near Melmaruvathur, with paddy plants and a helper for company. “I grow traditional rice varieties such mappilai samba and poongar ,” he says.
The biggest challenge for an organic farmer is to convert land that was abused for years into something that sprouts life with no application of chemical pesticides or fertilizers. “It took me a year to get saleable organic produce,” says Dinakar. But he kept his faith. “Nature will not fool us. After all, it was our mistake in the first place to contaminate our lands with chemicals. We have to be a little patient for it to go back to its original state.”
Another challenge for farming in present times is finding enough farm hands. Dinakar has an idea to overcome this: what if farmers came together to form a cooperative where they could take turns to work together in each other’s farms? “I haven’t found takers for the plan; but I’m sure it will work in the future,” he says.
It was their little boy’s illness that set off V.M. Parthasarathy and Rekha Ramu thinking. Why did he fall sick? Was there something wrong with what he was being fed? With both of them hailing from agricultural backgrounds, they started with food. “We wanted to give our son clean food,” says Rekha.
Natural farming took them in its folds. Partha met organic farming stalwarts such as Nammalvar, and read about Masanobu Fukuoka. The more they found out about its goodness, the more time they wanted to dedicate to it. That meant giving up their jobs in top IT firms. And they did. The couple now grows organic rice and more at their eight-acre land in Pandeswaram. They have an organic store at their garage, which they plan to expand soon.
The change from consumers to producers has transformed their lives. “We never miss the money,” says Rekha. “When I was working, I spent almost Rs. 500 a week on snacks for my son. Today, I make them myself. We do not depend on anyone for food. We seldom eat out or take the car out. Our medical expenses have reduced. We spend more time together as a family. We’ve got our lives back,” she smiles.
And farmer Jaishankar? Well, we never managed to talk to him. Farmers don’t want to waste even a minute.
