The Jai Kisan Jam Band

For 22-year-old Achintya Anand, it was in 2014 that the seeds of a life-transforming career change were sown. In a bid to understand the ingredients he cooked with (Anand was an executive chef), he began sowing and growing at home. The success and quality of the produce led to Krishi Cress, now a supplier of microgreens in and around Delhi. The in-house business of potted greens has in a year’s time spilled over to a 1.5-acre plot of land nearby where Anand plans to get into the alternate, refreshing universe of bhindi, baingan, broccoli and bunch grapes. All the produce, like microgreens, will be sold farm-fresh, within a few hours of harvest. Anand aims to make the farm an integrated one, “complete with insects, animals and birds. The idea is to bring back the concept of a self-sustaining farm and provide the consumer with good produce through collective action with the farming community”.

Anand is among a new crop of young Indians who are turning back to the soil, many giving up high-paying corporate jobs to get their hands dirty in farm and related careers like horticulture, fruiticulture, floriculture and dairy farming. Curiously, none of them have been lured by any romanticised notion of farming as a tax-free pastoral pursuit. A few were disenchanted with life in the fast lane of corporate wage slavedom. “The lack of corporate job security, coupled with work pressure, is compelling professionals to look for alternatives,” says Dr T. Manjunatha Rao, director, Indian Institute of Horti­cul­tural Res­earch. For others, the switchover came as part of a need to fashion a wholesale lifestyle change—or a near-evangelical mission to save the world, or at least one small plot of it.

Gayatri Bhatia, 30, an environment con­sultant for seven years now, was appalled by the excessive use of DDT and genetically modified seeds. Realising that she needed to practise what she pre­ached, she started organic farming on a 10-acre family plot in Wada, near Mum­bai. Today, Vrindavan Farm produces on average 5,000 kg of vegetables and fruits a year, in addition to herbs. In many cases, these neo-farmers are rank outsiders to the world of rhizomes and row crops, mostly drawn to it by a larger calling. Like Nisha Srinivasan and husb­and Ragunath Padmanabhan, who were keen to explore an alternative lifestyle path inspired by the philosophy of ServiceSpace, a volunteer-run group that fuses technology with social responsibility. The couple set up an agroforest on a 9-acre plot in Alandura village near Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, where today they run a farm based on natural farming principles, and run community progr­a­mmes, including training in organic farming, rural entrepreneurship and folk arts. Their son Aum is being ‘farm-sch­ooled’ on the premises, which in some ways is a barometer of the wholesale commitment to—and immersion in—their new way of life. “We’ve become rural folk,” says Srinivasan.

Photograph by Amit Haralkar

Anjali Raju, 34 Horticulturist, Agriculturist, Dairy farmer
Kabini

Ditching a banking career in the US, Anjali came home to Hyderabad and began dairy farming. It was thanks to farming that she met her husband as they trained people on organic farming methods. Now settled in Kabini, the couple run a 30-acre farm.

“The idea was to set up a self-sustaining farm, each element for the other and no addition...it’s attention to what already exists.”

Likewise, Nikki Chaudhary, 32, who completed an MSc in business econo­mics from the University of Sur­rey and was teaching there, gave it up to start a dairy farm in Pilibhit, Uttar Pradesh, under the state governm­ent’s Kam­a­d­henu Yojana. Hus­b­­and Gaurav, an eco­­n­omist, returned to his family roots in agri-business, but has taken it to a higher orbit of growth and revenue. “It more than makes up for the downsides, like the fact that where we live, the nearest restaurant is a two-hour drive away,” says Nikki. For others, like 36-year-old Pranay Juvvadi, who trained to be a doctor in the US, the call of his “watan ki mitti” proved too hard to resist. His entire family is in the US, but he returned to his ancestral 36-acre farm in Hyderabad, to tend to mango trees. “I may have earned more as a doctor in the US,” he acknowledges. “But to me, this is the life, even though it’s hard work, particularly given the difficulties in sourcing farm labour.”

Nothing exemplifies these neophytes more than The Urban Farmers, a group of five youngsters in Chennai, who are giving new meanings to the expression “terrace cultivation”. As part of an MBA project, they devised a plan for a rooftop farm, and after a few years in the corporate maze, have banded together to start up an urban farming project to harvest every rooftop and vacant, cultivable space in the city. They’ve even started up a farm consultancy business and established a franchise model, and are scaling up to corporate projects, which give them larger spaces to work on. Says Kern Agarwal, 28, one of the core members, “We want Chennai to become like any French city: full of organic gardens.” Ind­eed, more Indian cities could soon be going green, thanks to the efforts of Anand Shankar, who co-founded Spring­finity, to sell horticultural kits for city folks to easily set up their own kitchen gardens. Each kit, priced at Rs 1,999, inc­ludes seeds for three vegetables, soil and manure, a sprayer and a gardening guide. 

This contrarian trend of youngsters taking up farming goes against the grain of traditional subsistence farmers wanting to take up jobs in the big cities. According to a 2014 study on the State of Indian Farmers, conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), which surveyed about 5,000 farm households across 18 states, 62 per cent of farmers said they would quit farming for employment in the cities. “Many traditional farmers are giving up on agriculture, but simultaneously many educated youngsters are seeking out alternative career choices in farming,” notes agricultural scientist Dr M.S. Swaminathan, who pioneered the Green Revo­lu­tion in India in the 1960s. He sees this as a positive trend towards the modernising of agriculture. “To beat the volatility of the farming business, we need technological advancement, and we’re starting to see this, with youngsters  bringing in modern engineering techniques and information technology. And given their business acumen, they also add value to the farming practice.”

As Swaminathan points out, the embrace of modern agri-technology, fusing it with the wisdom of Japanese natural farming icon Masanobu Fukuoka, along with business best practices, helps this new crop of farmers hedge some of the risks associated with commercial agriculture. For instance, Vinoth Kumar, 32, who gave up a career in sales, started an integrated farm in Cheyur, near Chennai, where ‘biodynamic farming’ principles are applied. “We have a chicken farm on top of a fish pond, so the chicken waste becomes fish food; and the water from the fish pond is channelled into the farm, setting up a cycle of efficient use of resources,” he says.  Similarly, Anand now plans to set up an aquaponics farm, which fuses aquaculture with hydroponics techniques. And in Ban­g­alore, neo-farming couple Nithin Sagi and wife Hansa, both just 34, are looking to practice hydroponics in a greenhouse. The two practise “hands-on” farming; where they grow their produce in a controlled environment to maximise personal monitoring.

Gayatri Bhatia, 30 Horticulturist, Fruiticulturist
Mumbai

Gayatri’s dive into the farming world came as an altruistic move of saving cultivable land from DDT and other chemicals. On a soil replenishment mission, Gayatri began cultivation on a 10-acre piece of land just outside the city, working on the soil one patch at a time. “Slow nurturing is my way,” she says. Today, her farm produces 5,000 kg of fruits and vegetables, which she believes in supplying fresh to areas around the farm.

“Soil is the most essential element, but it’s also the most neglected. Care for it, reducing its burden, will ensure it’s 100% efficient.”

It isn’t confined to the fields alone, the invoking of farmyard tech. At her dairy farm in Pilibhit, Nikki has installed mechanised milking facilities and distillation parlours. The cows even have solar-powered water sprinklers to insulate them from the fury of the hot summer winds. For bre­eding purposes, frozen semen is imp­or­ted. Biodynamic farming often invokes a common-sensical approach to practising agriculture that harnesses the rhy­thms of the universe. Anjali Raju, who gave up the good life of a New York banker to set up a dairy farm in her native Hyderabad, and now runs a 30-acre biodynamic farm in Kabini, abides by a 27-day lunar calendar cycle for her farming operations. For 13 days when the moon is waxing, they tend to crops above the ground; for the 13 days when the moon is waning, the subterranean crops get their undivided attent­ion. No work is done on New Moon Day.

Given their scientific approach to their new-found career, the neo-farmers abide by a few unimpeachable articles of faith. Nearly every one of them is committed to soil replenishment as a long-term goal, even if it means forsaking produce on a part of their plot or a season’s crop in the short run. “My method is a little old-school,” acknowledges Bhatia. “I am patient about waiting for the land to be productive.”  And for many of them, size of plot holdings doesn’t matter overmuch. In fact, given their emphasis on natural farming, sustainability counts for more than scalability. “With organic farming, the smaller the farm, the better the control, and the more intimate the nature of interaction between farmer and consumer,” points out Raju. And committed as they are to the soil-to-plate model, where freshness of produce is paramount, most of these neo-farmers have elevated the concept of selling only in their geographical vicinity to an inviolable doctrine.

The economic sustainability of neo-farming still relies a lot on tax exemption of agricultural income and on subsidies. Says Aman Ahuja, who worked in a food processing multinational before returning to farm in his ancestral land in Khuban, Punjab: “In horticulture, the costs are high, and so are the risks. But by adopting agri-technology, and with even simple initiatives like greenhouses and cold storage chains, it is possible to tweak larger profits.” Branching off into ancillary businesses is a proven way to stabilise farm incomes. Karan Manral, a horticulturist in Goa, additionally runs a consultancy to help wannabe kitchen gardeners and gardenistas go green, and a seed store that sells across India. Income from dairy farming doesn’t qualify for tax exemption, which causes Daljeet Singh, president of the Progressive Dairy Farming Association, to bristle. “Dairy farming needs special infrastructure and production equipm­ent to be viable, and typically big dairy businesses can’t avail of even the few subsidies that are on offer,” he says. 

But despite these grouses on the margins, the entry of keen young minds and bodies into the farming ecosystem bodes well for the future, agree experts. This trend of educated youth taking up the sickle “will likely change the face of far­ming in the long run”, reckons Dr B.J. Pandian, director of the Water Tech­no­l­ogy Centre at the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University. On its part, the university has increased the number of short-term courses on offer for these neo-farmers, in response to an elevated demand. 

But in the final analysis, what draws young Indians to seek out this contrarian career option is the fact that it fulfils some primal needs, a curious resonance with the universe. “You begin to look philosophically at what ‘career growth’ means to you,” reasons Manral. “Today, I eat food that is richer than any millionaire’s...and that surely means a lot in the calculus of life.”