Sustainable Agriculture: Notes from the Ground

Oct 24: Poultry and Power

The first time we bought chicks for the farm we lost half of them in no time. A sudden rainstorm blew water in through a window and some of the chicks caught a chill. There was no electricity for several days as the step-down transformer for the area broke down. In the absence of light and warmth the chicks huddled together and the weaker ones got crushed to death. By the time we got our act together with mustard oil lamps fifteen of a lot of twenty five were gone. This was the trigger for my interest in solar lighting. We could not depend on the local electricity supply and therefore to the extent feasible we must be independent of the grid. The best place to start with was lighting. Irrigation too was important and we were spending way too much on diesel for the lift pump but the capital costs even after the hefty government subsidy of nearly 50% were forbidding. Plus solar powered pumps in the market such as TATA BP Solar's pumps could do around 40 feet while our water comes up from 65 feet; better not take a chance we felt.

One of our co-founders Kamaljit had run into Sanjay Gupta, a Boeing pilot working for Air India, at a camp on innovation run by Professor Anil Gupta, familiar to readers of the Sarvodaya blogs. Sanjay is fascinated by the Light a Billion Lamps solar lighting programme of TERI, the environment and energy thinktank. His dream is to turn one village in Bihar into a model village and then 'cut and paste' across the country. Given our emerging interest in solar power, Kamaljit connected me with Sanjay and we met in Gurgaon where he lives to drive up to the farm. Sanjay made a statement on carbon neutrality by driving up in his two-seater electic car, Reva. I could imagine a bumper sticker – "my other car (ahem)…is a Boeing 777". When we reached the farm, Sanjay began a demonstration of the power of solar with wellpracticed ease. On hand were the farm team and two farmers from the area - Rati Ram and another Sanjay.

First was a small wood gasifier rigged to a 3W solar panel. We watched fascinated as Sanjay made tea for the seven of us with a handful of wooden twigss. There was hardly any smoke after the initial ignition using a thimbleful of kerosene. The solar panel drove a small fan and the flame brightened as the flue gas, valuable fuel which is largely wasted in a traditional chullah, caught fire. We played with the fan speed by waving our arms in front of the panel. The same panel was then connected to a 100 lumens lantern. A full day of charge is sufficient for about 14 hours. This was the lamp we were looking for our poultry chicks. Cost: Rupees 1800 ($35) split roughly half and half between the lamp and the panel. The gasifier was an American product and costly. Sanjay's aim is to bring the cost down to about Rupees 2000. Meanwhile he is happy spreading the lamps around his adopted village. By splitting the charging and lighting functions he is helping create small businesses. A villager takes three rupees for a full charge every third day. The cost of Rupees one per day for the user compares well with the running cost of a kerosene lamp. I told Sanjay about our interest in solar irrigation and he mentioned how he was using a pump designed for 40 feet to pull up water from 80 feet. He also showed us how because of a mismatch between our irrigation pump's power and the pipe used to bring water up we were not using the pump efficiently. "Like driving with the brakes on." We showed Sanjay around the farm and struck a deal – he helps us with energy issues and we help him take dairy and integrated farming to his model village.

Back to poultry. This is what three months of running a poultry section have taught us. First the fixed costs. A 100 sq ft mud-brick-bamboo structure for 25-50 birds, say next to the family home or an existing dairy section, should cost around Rs. 5000 (mainly bricks, with labour free). A cement-brick construction will last longer but may be ten times more expensive. The birds need approximately 1 sq ft each when they are month old, going up to 2 sq ft. If bought as day old chicks they cost around Rs 10-20 a bird but you may have to add a 50-100% transportation cost. The water and feed trays could be terracota instead of plastic; this will keep both mother earth and the village potter happy. A few broken chairs or a makeshift wooden structure could serve as perch for the layers. If electricity is not a problem, an incandescent lamp can serve as brooder (a kerosene lamp could be a fire hazard). A few egg trays and a couple of coolers for transporting the meat complete the list.

Second, the running costs. Let us assume labour is 'free' i.e. a member from the family can spare an hour and a half every day for cleaning the henhouse, cleaning and filling up the water and feed trays and picking up the eggs etc. This leaves feed and marketing as the main running costs. Feed from a factory costs Rs. 625-700 per bag of 50 kg. A bird eats approximately 80 gms a day over 7 weeks. One bag of feed will therefore last twenty five of them a month. The feed bag can last longer if the birds can pick termite, grains and bugs from around the farm. If it is a purely broiler operation; the birds would be ready for slaughter in 8 weeks. The farmer could start with 25; add 25 after a month. Cull the first 25 in the third month and so on. Marketing costs would be butchering and dressing(say Rs 10-15 a bird), ice for packing the meat in coolers (Rs 1-2 per bird) and transporation to the market (Rs 3-4 per bird if the market is within 5-10 kilometers). Thus a lot of 25 birds would cost the farmer Rupees 2000 and fetch him Rupees 3000-4000 depending on the market. The net result is additional income of Rupees 500-1000 per month for an investment of approximately Rupees 6000. If the bird variety is dual-purpose you could add some incomes from the eggs to this 'all-in all-out' broiler operation. Some costs I have not factored in are vaccination, rice husk for covering the floor and lime for cleaning. However, these pale in comparison with the benefits of chicken manure and termite management that the hens do for you. Chicken manure itself becomes a key input in mushroom compost preparation.

The biggest challenge for an organic poultry operation is feed, followed by disease management. We have so far been lucky with the latter. The reasons are plenty of space, light and exercise for the birds as well as the use of natural tonics like amla (Indian gooseberry) juice and garlic. The first challenge we are still struggling with. I asked our feed supplier to take out the medicines (liver tonic, vitamins and antibiotics) as well as products of animal origin (bone and fish meal) from the feed. You will be shocked to know that this results in a price revision of only Rupees 30 per bag. The worst stuff is the cheapest. The main ingredients of feed are maize, bajra (a valuable source of Methionine), soyabean/mustard oil cake, rice polish and Dicalcium Phosphate or Limestone powder. We have just harvested our own bajra and corn. We will be producing our own mustard in some months and we will be fixing our own feed grinder soon. That is when I can tell you about the economics of making your own feed.

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Sustainable Agriculture: Notes from the Ground

Sept 20: My friend Arun and I had just finished planting radishes, turnips and carrots on ten odd raised beds. Exhausted by work in the unusually hot autumn morning, we sat down for a late breakfast with the farm team of Ram Singh, Kuldeep and Sukhwinder. There was a shout at the gate and a wry Haryanvi Jat, sturdy peasant-warriors that straddle three religions and the India-Pakistan border, of our age walked in. Rati Ram owns 11 acres of land right next to our Model Farm at Village Pathreri. By any count he counts among the top 20% of Indian farmers in terms of landholding. Ram and the boys know him as he often comes looking for water to drink and to chat. I ask him what he sows. Bajra (a course grain for marginal lands), wheat and mustard is the answer. The yields for the last two at around 1800 kilograms per acre and around 1000 kilos/acre respectively are about half the average in Punjab, India's green revolution champion. I ask him why he has'nt tried dals (pulses) and black gram. He says he did but could not handle the pests. We talk about what FFF does and there is scepticism on his weary face.

The planting was fun; probably a first for Arun, a corporate lawyer. We use a mix of seeds from an Austrian organic seed company, from Navdanya (Vandana Shiva's farmers' seed exchange) and hybrid seeds from the wholesale Indra market in old Delhi. Next to the beds was our Azolla tank. We have been experimenting with this floating fern brought in a plastic bag full of water from the Indian Agriculture Research Institute in Delhi. It multiplied rapidly but since we do not do paddy in these parts we have to find other uses for its amazing ability to fix Nitrogen from the air. We tried giving it to the cattle; pooh they turned up their noses. The hens were only marginally more appreciative. Standing next to the velvety, carpet like tank gave us an idea. Why not use it as mulch? Like excited high school children in a lab, we decided to set up two control beds for comparison – regular plastic mulch and no mulch. In went the seeds and the vermicompost followed by the fern, which looked beautiful in the brown earth.

We helped the boys sort and weigh the week's produce. Our first vegetable this year is the humble Ghia (a gourd). I love the soft, subtle texture of its sabzi, especially if cooked in desi ghee (clarified butter). Its juice is precribed for lowering cholestrol. The next one is Okra. We try to make packets of a kilo and a half using an enourmous scale the boys use for weighing feed. I curse myself for leaving the kitchen scale behind and finally we decide to count the pieces and sell them by the packet and not by weight. We come to a consensus on what the retail price of Okra (Rs 35/kg) and Ghia (Rs 20/kg) is in Delhi and price the lot accordingly. Arun still had one more thing to do – bathe with water from the irrigation pump. My mind went back to a summer nearly thirty years back. We had gone to attend a wedding at a farm in a village in Punjab. It was unbearably hot and the water coming out with full force from the pump was irrestibly inviting. I and some boys of my age must have gone in and out about thirty times before my alarmed parents pulled me out. I still have not equalled this personal record of the number of showers taken in a day in the rural equivalent of a Jacuzzi.

Sept 26: It is a long weekend and we decide to drive down en famille to Chandigarh, 250 kms north of Delhi. This is the city of my youth; clean, planned and prosperous. The kids sleep through most of the ride till I park the car in front of the Northern region office of the Central Poultry Development Organisation in Chandigarh. An enourmous statue of an egg greets us so do, well, ostriches from down under. I am tempted to ask our host, Mr Surinder Singha, the hatchery incharge, how many farmers have bought into the ostrich business model but restraint rules. We talk about the courses they offer, the layer and broiler breeds they hatch and various aspects of the poultry business. One of Mr Singha's colleagues whispers out of the earshot of my wife and mother that the slimmer the female the better the prospects of its laying eggs. I tell Mr Singha of our experience with poultry and our interest in one of the hens they breed – Nirbheek or fearless. This is a cross between two breeds, one of them a fighting cock called Aseel. It can roam around the farm to forage for food and face down cats and dogs. One of our founder members – Dr S L Mehta – has seen excellent results with this breed both as broilers and layers in the tribal areas of Rajasthan where he works now after retiring as the Vice Chancellor of an agriculture university.

We book 100 chicks and five slots for the first poultry course in November. Mr Singha tells us that if we can encourage women farmers to attend, he will give 20 chicks per farmer free. Then he makes a proposal which causes some alarm in the family. Why don't you take some adult hens and chickens with you today? Water on the journey is the main problem but you can cut some cucumbers for them to bite into, he suggested. I promise to return after dropping the family off at my mother's place and en route we convince my mother to keep the hens in her backyard for a couple of days till our return to Delhi. My dear friends, we had no clue what we were getting ourselves into!

I returned to the hatchery with a fullly woken up nine year old girl and a four year old boy. We selected a cock and six hens and my son, who always runs to the chicks the moment we reach the farm, decided to lead the party, two hens firmly under his armpits. The birds were weighed and priced (Rs 60/kg) and we put them in the cartons at the back of the car for the short ride to Grandma's house in South Chandigarh. We slipped them swiftly to the backyard, me sheepishly, the kids unabashedly. My mother has a small backyard with a tin shed which stores several items of old furniture, pots and pieces (picture left). We housed the birds in the shed and made them comfortable with water and feed. The chicken had a shy, head hung to the side look and my mother told me of an old Punjabi saying in which you compare a moping man with precisely such a chicken. The hens were pluckier and went about gently clucking. I thought of laws in U.S. cities which forbid cockrels within the city limits and prayed that Chandigarh did not have such laws and that in any case Mum's neighbours would be understanding over the weekend.

By the evening, the backyard smelt nicely of chicken poo and the thinnest hen had made a roost on a broken chair and laid an egg. Mercifully the chicken was still silent. As darkness fell we began to worry more about the neighbourhood cats than the decibel levels. We lit a candle inside, covered the shed entrance and leaned some stones against it. I also decided to sleep outside but ran in after midnight when all the mosquitoes in the area decided to make a meal of me. The chicken woke me up, and I guess a few others, at 530 am with a full throated cry. I ran out and saw a skinny cat trying to sneak in. It was shooed away and the chicken recovered his nerves soon. Of course the biggest tomcats in the neighbouhood were soon prowling the area. We survived the night with some reinforced defensive measures and my mother would have been very happy to see us off the following morning. We stopped midway for a tea at a friend at the National Dairy Research Insitute and gingerly lifted the boot to check on the hens. The neatly laid out cartons with 1-2 birds settled around pieces of cucumber were a total mess. The hens had made groups of their own and there was poop all over the place. I decided to press on regardless. We stopped at our home in Delhi and the kids brought down some cold water to feed the hens. Arun joined me on the last leg of the birds' journey to the farm. I sprayed the car with a deo before he stepped in and apologised for the awful smell. Thankfully he had a stuffy nose but my embarrassment was not over. He had asked a friend of his, a TV producer, to join us en route. Sandeep hopped in at Gurgaon and told us about his dream of starting a farm in Rajasthan. Arun wanted him to see our experiment and make up his mind.

The hens reached safely. We took Sandeep around the farm and explained to him our philosophy of integrated sustainable agriculture and our business model of tying a farm, financed by donestors, to a group of urban consumers. As we sorted the veggies, I told him that it may perhaps be better for him to begin with organic cereals and pulses, things that can be stored and transported without much of a fuss to the nearest city. Sales pitch for reversing the brain drain from agriculture over, my thoughts returned to Rati Ram and the somewhat silly story of the hens. Imagine what it takes for a guy with a car, mobile phone, internet and education to find and transport a decent breed of poultry. Now imagine a 'prosperous' farmer like Rati Ram who will probably have to take the bus to Chandigarh and argue with the driver to allow him to travel on top with the birds. He might as well go back to his three crops or even if he wants to add some poultry he might as well go to the nearest DOC (Day Old Chick) factory incubator and pump the chicks he buys with drugs laden feed. Unless he gets a Sandeep or an Arun into the picture.

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Monsoon and agriculture

All eyes have been skyward in recent weeks in North India. July is when most of the rain falls in Southern Asia. However, the rain gods have played truant this year. Despite all the advances made with irrigation and technology, agriculture is still hugely dependent on rain. The first table below (see the entire Times of India article) shows how rainfall correlates brutally and directly with GDP growth, and thus with poverty alleviation. A similar correlation can be drawn with Inflation which has been near zero for a while in India but is now creeping up. Newspapers are full of stories about how prices of pulses, a major source of protein for Indians, have nearly doubled. Farmers, who we often forget are also consumers of food items, rarely get a decent share of the rise in the price of food grains, pulses and vegetables when production starts to slip. Most profits are cornered by traders. As farmers earn less and pay more their incomes drop. Governments have to scramble to provide a safety net say through rural employment programs, leaving aside long term priorities for the moment.

Reducing agriculture's vulnerability to variation in rain fall is no easy task. There is a physical limit to how much precipitation you can trap in the ground in times of abundance for use later. Short term palliatives like planting coarse grains and other drought resistant plants are hampered by: lack of extension and training, farmer buy-in into high yielding, water-guzzling varieties and sub-optimal marketing of alternative produce. Often it is too late by the time the farmer realizes he needs to do something different. Rains may turn out to be normal the following year and it is easy to recline back into old habits.

This perspective changes if integrated, sustainable agriculture is practiced on a long term basis. It is well documented that use of green manure, composting methods, rotation and inter-cropping reduces the need for water and raises the resilience of the system as a whole. Diversity of agriculture production itself acts as an insurance against the vagaries of weather. The challenge, however, is that this is not 'lazy' agriculture – neither for the farmer nor for Government and extension agencies. You cannot just bung in the seeds, douse the soil with Urea and DAP, flip over the motor switch that pumps out ground water and wait for harvest day. The farmer has to plan, be in tune with what is happening at the farm and in the market, innovate, in short act more like an entrepreneur than a cog in the production chain. The extension agencies – government or non-government – have to be out in the fields, reducing the lab to land distance, collapsing the field to fork gap. We all – as consumers of food – have to step up to the plate by eating local, diverse, fresh and nutritious.

As I finish this piece, Delhi has had an evening of torrential rain. More than 50% of the rain to fall since June has come down in a single evening. The hope is that Kharif planting may not be completely lost and some moisture may stay in the soil till fall for the Rabi cropping season. It may not be a drought year after all. Business as usual next year?

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Watching chicken television in the evening

Read on and click here next for some FAQs on backyard chickens. There are plenty of websites devoted to this subject.

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Sustainable agriculture in cities - 2

17,000 hogs housed in 18 barns surrounded by an electric fence. This line in an NPR story caught my eye a few weeks ago. Animals and humans have lived together in human habitats for thousands of years ever since agriculture began. Pathogens have jumped back and forth many times. The tuberculosis bug may for example have come to humans from dairy animals. The practitioners of 'modern' industrial agriculture and agriculture and food policy makers may seem to be separating us with electric fences and antibiotics from these terrible bugs. However, the swine flu breakout illustrates dramatically that this paradigm has failed miserably. Disallowing dairy animals, poultry and pigs from urban areas in the name of hygiene and health only forces these ancient companions of humans into 'concentration camps' like the one in La Gloria. There they are pumped with antibiotics and vaccines, again in the name of health. Mark Schlosberg describes in the San Jose Mercury News of 19 May how the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in factory farms is endangering our health.

Instead of factory farms we need integrated farms where pigs can be pigs as part of an overall multi-species ecology. This would be both environmentally and economically sane. Jatey pota, vatey rota goes an Indian proverb - where there is dung there is food. But the modern mind revolts, wants to separate and sanitize. And then it wonders why are these plagues still visiting me?

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Sustainable agriculture in cities - 1

The Full Circle Farm (http://fullcirclesunnyvale.org/wp_fcf/index.php) is an oddity in the heart of the Silicon Valley. A few years ago when a High School was downgraded to a Middle School in Sunnyvale, eleven acres of land suddenly became available. Community residents were loathe to see the land disappear under Condo concrete. Some of them hastily wrote out a plan for an urban farm and then scrambled to find people who could actually farm when the School Board voted for the plan. Thus was born the 70,000,000 dollar farm. I did not get the zeros wrong, that truly is the estimated cost of this parcel of land. Here's food for thought for all those who believe in urban sustainable farming. There is no agribusiness model that can recover a capital investment of 70 million dollars from 11 acres. Unless the society at large finds some way of sharing the burden of capital costs farmers will not be able to practice sustainable agriculture in urban areas. The second biggest challenge as we shall see below is regulatory. Full Circle is thus a courageous flag planted in the middle of what was once the Valley of Heart's Delight, the American Indian name for what is now the Silicon Valley.

The farm plans to use a combination of capital subsidy (mainly by the Santa Clara School District), grants (the $40,000 tractor has been financed by Kaiser Permanente), volunteer labor (your blogger spent a day picking veggies at the farm last fall), future fees from educational programs, and revenue from produce to achieve financial viability in four years. The key concept is Community Supported Agriculture or CSA. Thirty-two community members pitch in $300 every quarter or $100 a month for a share of the produce. The mutual benefits are obvious: as there are no middlemen 100% of the revenue returns to the farmer and the consumer gets nearly 20% off his purchase while bonding with the land on which their food is grown. Some farms allow CSA participants to pick and package their food; Full Circle follows a different method. The produce is sorted into separate packets in a packing shed for CSA members to pick up. Casual buyers are welcome too to buy produce twice a week from the farm stand (Wed and Fri 3-7 pm). Last summer sales topped several hundred dollars a day. And a half-acre educational garden produces something that cannot be counted in dollars and cents. Sixth graders from the nearby school come once a week to learn about food and farming. There are plans for more; a donor will soon fund on job-training for 10-12 youth who will provide much needed voluntary labor. In that sense Full Circle will follow the tradition set by the Bay Area's Hidden Villa (www.hiddenvilla.org) farm, a pioneer in environmental education for both children and adults.

The CSA model looks neat but the challenges are deep even if you discount the struggle with the fickle character of both funders and volunteer labor. For example, city laws prevent roosters and dairy animals from being kept in urban zones. I for one can't figure out why a rooster's cry is more bothersome than a dog's bark or a leaf blower's drone. And no cows imply no decent manure. Let's remember that two things that really make a farm sustainable are in-house composting and production of plant material. Without animals you are forced to depend on yard waste or manure bought from outside. Food preferences are another challenge. Full Circle farmers are frustrated by the reluctance of school canteens to buy their produce. Reasons vary from lack of staff to 'process' fresh food (it is far easier to dump a can into a pan) and urban children's confused state when they behold melons with seeds! My personal favorite grouse: you cannot use a tractor outside of 10 am-4pm. Don't count therefore on making your vegie beds bright and early in the morning and trooping off to your class thereafter.

However, any believer in sustainable agriculture will take heart when (s)he beholds the hundred young fruit trees at the farm. Orchards used to be a feature of the Valley of Heart's Delight. Full Circle shows that sustainable agriculture can be practiced against all odds in the city.

And did you notice who else just dug a bit of urban land with some kids for a vegetable garden?

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Farmers First Foundation

March 18, 2009: It was a proud day at Farmers First Foundation (www.farmersfirstfoundation.org), a non-profit dedicated to sustainable agriculture. More than fifty farmers from all over India gathered at the Foundation's first Model Farm at Village Pathredi in Haryana, 65 km from Delhi for the Foundation's first training and demonstration camp. They listened to a presentation on sustainable, integrated agriculture from the Foundation's Chairman, Rajbir Singh. They discussed their problems, found solutions and encouragement from the Foundation's experts and from each other. And they welcomed a visitor from Stanford, Peter Frykman, who demonstrated his low cost Drip Irrigation technology (www.driptechnologies.com). A journalist from a North Indian newspaper the Tribune covered the event.

Farmers First Foundation aims at demonstrating the viability of sustainable agricultural activity by setting up Model Farms integrating 5-7 bioresource activities such as dairy-feed-fodder, compost-making and waste management, vegetable and fruit cultivation, honey bee keeping, mushroom cultivation, medicinal and aromatic plant cultivation, nursery and gradation as well as agro-practices for managing a transition to organic agriculture such as preparation of biopesticides and biofertilizers. A pyramidal approach is taken with Model Farms ranging in size from 4-6 acres to 100 acres. The farms are funded by 'donesters' or corporate partners. Land, as at Village Pathredi is often 'lent' by abstenee landlords or practicing farmers. No potential partner is shunned - government, corporates dependent on bioresources, urban dwellers interested in agriculture; the belief is that agriculture is a public good that should concern everyone. The belief also is that agriculture is sustainable no matter what the scale provided you return the ownership of agripreneurship, technology and protection of the environment to the rightful owner - the farmer. And provided you shatter the mass of negative beliefs nurtured by decades of one-size-fits-none solutions.

What's next at Farmers First Foundation? Children from Mirambika, a free progress school set up on the Yoga principles of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother next to IIT Delhi, would be visiting the farm on March 29. They will see with their own eyes how interconnected we are, how life and death dance together on the compost heap, and what links cow poop to pizza! More on that later.

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