Moong Over Microchips

by Venkat Iyer

  As we walked back, against the fading sunset, leaving behind a smiling old lady, I couldn’t help but wonder that here, nestling in the foothills of an unknown mountain away from the hustle and bustle of the road or the city, were the real people of India. These were the people who still held on to the rich biodiversity of our land and no one even cared about them. They had never heard of hybrids, fertilizers or pesticides. They just grew their rice and ate what they got. The old lady we met had probably never left Boripada. Her world was unspoilt by ‘progress’. And for once I was grateful for that.

  System of Rice Intensification

  There is a lot being said about the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), which is an innovative method to grow rice. This method was initially discovered in Madagascar where one of the farmers noticed that even if the rice field was not flooded with water, the crop was excellent and the yields high. The method had then been adopted in India and was released for use by farmers by the Central Rice Research Institute in Hyderabad.

  I was keen on trying this method and had to make slight modifications as I had no intention of transplanting the rice. I spoke with a couple of scientists and they felt the modified method could work, but they had not heard of anyone trying it.

  The rice seeds had to be planted at a distance of 25 centimetres from each other and this was not possible manually. I devised a small rake using a plank and strips of wood. The wooden teeth were nailed to the plank at even intervals of 25 centimetres each. Baban and I then pulled this plank across the field, first horizontally and then vertically, to form a sort of grid on the soil. We got some help from the village and asked them to plant 4–5 seeds at the intersection of each square grid. It worked beautifully and within a couple of days we had sowed the entire field. All this was done before the rains.

  The next week it rained and soon enough we saw tiny rice saplings neatly growing at a distance of 25 centimetres each. The rains continued without respite for a whole month. Along with the rains came another disaster. Baban fell ill and had to be hospitalized. With excess water and no weeding the grass grew as high as the rice and in some places managed to outgrow the rice.

  Kasbai is a long-duration crop (160 days) and our land is on a height. The monsoon retreated after 120 days and the land started drying up. I could not install the pump to water the rice. By the end of the season we knew we had lost the entire rice crop. A couple of weeding sessions and watering towards the end would have saved the day but I was unable to do this alone. It was a tragedy that we could not save such an excellent variety of rice. I kept ruing the fact that I had failed to grow this elusive Kasbai.

  I realized how modern agricultural methods with the so-called tested hybrids had nearly wiped out this traditional variety of rice that had once ruled these areas. The scientists at the rice institutes are promoting hybrids and now we are threatened with genetically modified rice. All this is expensive to grow and also does not have the same taste as the old traditional varieties. It would be a tragedy if all the traditional varieties disappeared and we were left eating insipid hybrid varieties which we are in many cases.

  Years later, when my friend Vipul bought land, he managed to grow Kasbai and save the seeds too. He still grows the rice every year and we buy it from him.

  8

  The Present Scenario

  It was more than nine years after we bought the land and had planned to move to the village that the move finally happened. Meena was doing well in her job and was soon promoted to chief of bureau, The Hindu, Mumbai. This meant longer hours and more responsibilities. Even when she came to the farm to stay she would be monitoring the news and coordinating from here to ensure that the reportage for the paper did not suffer. It was in 2013 that she was offered a posting in Pakistan as the paper’s correspondent there. Once she left the country, I too packed my bags and moved to the village.

  The last nine years, I stayed at the farm during the week, returning to the city for the weekend except during harvest or sowing when I stayed back to finish the work. I felt like I was on an IBM project where I used to shuttle between our project site and the city. During the nine years at the farm, there was a lot of learning and unlearning that happened.

  I experimented with a lot of crops to see what all I could grow on the land. In my quest to grow our own food, I experimented with turmeric, mustard, wheat, jowar, maize, varieties of pulses and oil seeds till I found which ones were ideal to grow on our land. One of the first lessons I learnt was that everything does not grow everywhere. Each crop was dependant on the soil conditions, the temperature, the humidity in the air and the water content. What did well in one area will not necessarily grow in ours. Also the selection process is a slow activity. When you experimented with one variety and found it did not work well, you had to wait for the next season to try the next variety or to rectify the mistakes you had made in the earlier season.

  Besides the crops I sowed each season, I also learnt a lot about the fruit trees we planted as the years went by. I planted a couple of cashew trees which gave ample fruits every year. The Alphonso mango did not grow well as compared to the Kesar or Malgoba variety which flourished. This I learnt only after five years when they started fruiting. I replaced all my Alphonso trees with the Kesar variety, but I had lost five years before I did the switch. I planted passion fruit which grew well at the farm and the drink we make from it is very popular.

  In the city, when one shops, you can only see the produce. No one knows when it was grown. There are different varieties for different seasons. The moong you grow in the monsoon is the Kopargaon variety while the one you grow in rabi is the Vishaki variety. Both look the same after the harvest. I learnt this the hard way by sowing the wrong moong one season and realizing the mistake only when the crop failed. It is the same for all crops and one has to be careful when selecting the seeds.

  After our first two crops of rice had been a failure, we tried and planted as many traditional varieties of rice as we could find in the area. After a few seasons we finally decided that the best rice in terms of taste and yield on our land was the Kala Karjat. ‘Kala’ means black and ‘Karjat’ was the variety. The husk of the rice is black, which is from where it gets its name, and the aroma and taste suited our palate. We decided that we would continue with this rice for our consumption till we find a better one, which we have not till date. We take the rice to the local rice mill where I pay him extra money to give me unpolished rice. It is amusing for the mill workers that I do not get the rice polished and they all crowd around and hold the rice and smell the same. Once one of them even remarked, ‘Seth comes from the city and eats unpolished rice, while we from the village have stopped eating it.’

  Besides Kala Karjat we also heard of a red variety of rice that the local villagers had used years ago, but long abandoned for the newer hybrid varieties. I looked all around for the seeds till I heard of an Adivasi in the nearby village who had and was still growing the rice. I contacted my friend Raghu Valvi from the village and asked him to try and get some seeds for me from this Adivasi. Raghu managed to get me a few kilos and we have been planting the same rice since then. It is called Kudai and after dehusking the rice is dark red in colour. Meena likes to eat the rice cooked plain though I am not very fond of it in that form. We use the rice to make dosas, idlis and other dishes which need ground rice.

  The villagers were excited when they heard that I was growing Kudai and some of the elders even shook my hand. They recollected how they also used to grow the rice and eat bhakris made of it. They told me, ‘The bhakris made from the new hybrid rice tastes like paper, but the bhakri from Kudai is like nectar.’

  Besides selecting the correct variety, one had to also experiment with the method of sowing. All around us the method used for rice plantation was the transplantation method. Nurseries are prepared at the start of the monsoon and after a month the rice is transplanted into the fields. The entire family and sometimes even labour from the nearby villages were em
ployed in transplanting the rice. I was sure I would not be able to handle it. Besides Baban had his own field to transplant and there was no way he would come to work at my place. I tried and tested many ways of growing rice with less labour and finally worked out a way to do it. I waited for the rains to fill the field and then ploughed the land to make it muddy and sticky. This way the grass was buried under the mud and reduced the effort of weeding. I then just broadcast the rice and let it overcome the grass. It worked well for me though the yield was low and did not match the village standards. The rice we got was enough to feed us with a little surplus to be sold off in Mumbai.

  As the years went by, I experimented with some new crops each season. At first I tried everything on a small scale and then when I had a fair knowledge of the crop cycle and its finer details I increased the area. We now grow sesame and groundnuts for oil, two varieties of rice and a range of pulses like tur, moong, urad and val (field beans). Besides, each season we plant different vegetables that grow well in our area. Ladyfinger, pumpkin, brinjal, cluster beans, string beans, carrot, radish, sponge gourd and yam are some of the vegetables that do well on our land. I now have pepper, mustard, turmeric, basil, lemongrass, allspice tree and ginger as well. The turmeric from our land is pure and even when just one pinch is added to the food the aroma fills the entire house. It only reconfirms our belief that there is rampant adulteration in the market.

  The betel leaf plant we got from Kerala is very popular in the village and they all come to take a few for their religious ceremonies all through the year.

  I managed to get in touch with the Coconut Board of India which has an office in Palghar and got fifty coconuts which I planted all over the farm. They are just two years old and though a few did not survive the rest are doing well.

  The mangoes, gooseberry and lemon grown on our farm are made into pickles every year which easily lasts us through the year. The mango pickles range from the baby mango pickle to the large cut mango pickle and the shredded mango pickle.

  The variety of crops increased and now I was worrying about crop yields, the rains, composting, seeds and the like. Looking back, I had come a long way from that evening when in a moment of madness I decided to quit my job at IBM without even owning a plot of land.

  In 2014, Meena was expelled from Pakistan and posted to Delhi. After nine months she was transferred to Chennai and that’s when she decided enough was enough. She finally decided the time had come for her to quit and join me at the farm. Her job had made us financially more comfortable as compared to when we started out in 2004. We decided to dig into our capital and make some essential changes to our house. The asbestos roof had cracked in places and was leaking during the monsoon. Also we had a rodent problem. They were living between the gaps in the roof. Though they were harmless except for making irritating scampering noises all night, it was the predators that came after them that worried us. We had already spotted a couple of rat snakes sneak under the roof looking for a fresh kill. A pair of bronzeback snakes was residing under the roof in the front porch too. They are not poisonous but it was unnerving to sit in the front porch with a snake slithering over your head as it went about hunting geckos.

  There is a lot one needs to learn and adjust when you shift from the city to the village. There are many things that we take for granted in the city which are non-existent in the village. The 24/7 power supply, the newspaper vendor, the milkman, the garbage collector, the excellent mobile network, the corner shop, the cobbler and the entire service industry which is at your beck and call is missing in the village. No one comes to do the daily household chores or small tasks in the village and one has to manage on one’s own. The Do It Yourself (DIY) culture in the western world is the norm in the village. I soon got my own set of equipment like a drill machine, a spanner set, a hammer set and other carpentry tools for repairs at the farm.

  Living in the village brought us closer to the realities of the rural economy. It is one thing to sit in the city and read about farmer distress and suicide and another to actually see it upfront. I used to always wonder why someone would end their life because they could not repay loans as low as Rs 20,000. Now I could understand the trauma and distress they went through when a crop failed and they had no money. If a money lender or official visited someone to recover dues, it wasn’t long before the news spread though the village. One of our neighbours had their television set taken away by the credit recovery guys as they could not repay the loan they had taken during the drought in 2015. The lady of the house was so embarrassed with the episode that she did not leave her house for almost a year.

  The price of crops and marketing was a major sore point with everyone. From the first season, we had problems marketing our produce. After our experience with the first crop of moong, we started retail sales. Over the years, we have tried various experiments with marketing. We even tried to set up a retail vegetable enterprise in Mumbai but had to give it up soon. It is not easy to produce and market at the same time. Our experience taught us that doing both was not doing justice to either.

  The struggle to find labour to work on the land is a constant one. With salaries zooming in the manufacturing and service industry, the young are not interested in working on the land. The few old people have their own land to till and finding time to work at our farm was getting increasingly difficult for them. I scaled down my production so we could manage with the little labour that we could get and thought of ways and means of reducing the labour on the farm. From our initial two sacks of groundnuts, we scaled down to one. Large-scale vegetable farming was stopped and we planted only to meet our needs.

  Living in the village also meant dealing with snakes and scorpions. There was no wildlife except for boars but they were in the mountain close by. While they did leave us alone most of the time, we had a couple of close encounters. While snakes usually steer clear, I was once doing some work near a chikoo tree when I accidentally disturbed a hornet’s nest. It stung me on my upper lip and for a couple of days I walked around looking like an incarnation of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman, much to the amusement of the villagers.

  A Day at the Farm

  One of the first things that we realized when we started staying in the village was the complete lack of household help which we are so accustomed to in Mumbai and other cities. The women in the village, like everywhere else in the country, did all their work and more. They thought little of waking up really early, cooking, cleaning, washing clothes at the river, spending a full day in the field and returning to do the evening meal and other chores. I tried a lot to get someone to help me clean the house at least, but no one was willing to do it. At first, I thought it was because I was alone that no woman wanted to come for housework. After Meena moved to the village in 2015, we tried again but could not find anyone who was willing to come.

  We divided the housework between ourselves. While she cleaned the house and made the rotis, I cooked the meal and washed the clothes. We bought a washing machine after a tiring year of washing clothes and consoled ourselves that it meant using the same amount of precious water.

  I have always been an early riser from childhood and at the farm it was not different. I usually hear the cock crowing around 5.30 a.m. and get up, if my cat doesn’t wake me up earlier, that is. In summer I can hear the familiar sounds of bulbuls, mynahs, crow pheasants and sometimes sunbirds and some others. I then start the coffee machine and cook chicken legs and rice in the pressure cooker for the pets. We have three cats now, Minimus, Whitey and Dada, and a dog, Pepper. Pepper will already be at the front door, waiting for me to step out. After the mandatory petting we both go and sit by the river. I have my coffee there. The opposite bank of the river teems with children from the Adivasi Ashram Shala School, bathing and preparing to go to their classes. On some days we spot the odd fisherman working his nets in the river. While I sit and stare at the river, Pepper sits on her stone platform that we built for her next to the chapra.

  A good half hou
r later both of us return to the house. By this time the cooker has cooled and the food is served to the pets. Pepper is fed in the front porch while the tomcats get their share in the back porch on a table. Mini the princess of course is served in the kitchen. She refuses to eat with the others.

  I usually walk for forty-five minutes every day, sometimes Meena walks too, and this is also the time Pepper loves to play. The moment we start to walk she will grab her play bone or a stick and start running before us. She runs up and down with the bone, daring us to take it away from her, growling if we came close and taking off again. Rarely do we get a chance to steal the bone from her and she usually gets tired after a few furious jumps.

  The walk gets over by 8 a.m. after which I start preparing our breakfast. It is usually idli or varieties of dosa made from our own rice and dal or poha (puffed rice) made from the red rice Kudai.

  As breakfast is being prepared Baban usually arrives with chicken legs from Baburao’s son Sagar’s shop for the pets’ next meal. He then ties Pepper to the front porch and releases the hens. I discuss the morning tasks with him and he goes into the field to start his work.

  Breakfast is usually from 9 to 9.30 during which we also firm up the menu for lunch. After breakfast I join Baban in the field for the task of the day, while Meena starts with the cleaning of the house.

  We usually have a tea break around 10.30 by which time the house cleaning would be done with. A quick cup of tea and Baban would resume his task. I stay back at the house to begin the preparations for lunch.