The geologist having failed miserably, I decided to get a geophysicist. He brought along an ultrasonic device and sent pulses into the earth and took measurements. He marked a spot for drilling. When we dug there we hit an underground massif of rock. Further drilling became impossible and we stopped.
I was now a desperate man. If we did not have water soon enough, our efforts over the past months would have proved futile. Worse, my waterless coconut plants would wilt. Science had not come in handy. Someone recommended a water-diviner. On the particular evening the water-diviner was to come to the farm, it had been pouring. The stream had risen and could not be easily forded. The small bridge of stone slabs that we had laid across it was of no use because water was overflowing it. The water-diviner could not swim so we had to devise a way to bring him across.
We decided to a tie a rope to the other end so that the man could hold it and pull himself across. It was a heavy coir rope. The strongest among us tried to throw it to the other side but each time it fell into the water getting wet and heavier. I swam across and tied the rope to a stout tree. The others stayed back to help the water-diviner. They tied a rope to the man’s waist and held the other end of the tether. With great difficulty and much encouragement from all of us, the diviner eventually managed to cross the stream.
There are different kinds of water-diviners. One kind uses a metallic pendulum tied to a metal bar. The diviner holds the bar horizontal and goes about the job. He acts as the medium for the passage of energy to the pendulum. Where there is water, the pendulum experiences a strong force and begins oscillate in a circular direction. The oscillation suggests that the source of water is somewhere below that point.
Our water-diviner was not of this kind. He used a twig he tore off from one of the wild trees on the farm. He chose a twig that was shaped loosely like a Y, a much larger piece than one would use for making a catapult. He pruned off the leaves and made himself a serviceable divining tool. With both hands he held the twig at an arm’s distance from his stomach, in such a way that the protuberance that made it look like a Y rather than a U or a V, distended. He slowly toured the farm, walking steadily but as if in a trance.
The water diviner had decided, from the sceptical expression on my face, that I was a non-believer. Therefore, in order to convince me that he could really help me find water and to justify the rather high fee of Rs 1000, the diviner held out a guarantee. He said he would definitely locate the water source. He was sure of that. However, on the slim prospect of failure, he said he would return the money. It was a proper money-back guarantee!
Twig-using water-diviners were supposed to look for sudden, energetic backward and forward swings of the twig; the greater the impulse on the twig, the larger and closer the water deposits.
I followed him closely, with hope in my heart, but all the while chiding myself for being so gullible as to trust someone whose logic made no sense to me. The man stopped suddenly. Whether it was a sleight of hand, made to appear plausible through years of practice, or because it was indeed the action of a new kind of force that physicists are yet to unravel, a miracle occurred: the twig did a vertical twirl. The diviner bent down in a state of half reverie and half reverence and examined the spot. Then, drawing in a deep breath, he said with cocky finality, ‘Dig here and you shall find water’.
He went around for a little while longer and showed me one or two other spots as well. We dug at one spot but nothing came of it, we dug at another and were disappointed, at the third place we found a thin jet of a little spring at sixty metres. It yielded a few gallons an hour, sufficient for cooking and bathing. We installed a small pump. The water diviner had proved to be more successful than the others, but that was just by chance. Strangely, however, as the days passed, the bore-well began to yield more and more water. After a year it was yielding 2000 gallons of water an hour! I desist from comment but I still think that all the three were playing blind man’s bluff. A few years later, judging that it was a game of chance, I asked Raju to dig at ten places: our hit rate was 40 per cent!
We worked on a shoestring budget. Economy was the necessity which spawned the idea of the donkey draft. What sees us through difficult situations in life is not resources but the ability to be resourceful. As Steve Jobs of Apple said, ‘sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations’. All of us, my workers included, constantly came up with ideas. Some were good; some outrageous. We tried to experiment with cattle, harvesting, and planting. Thinking up new ideas had become a way of life on the farm. Subsequently, the electricity supply reached the farm, and when the pump-set became operational I decided to sell the donkeys.
On the periphery, the patch along the dry bed of the stream which I had left undisturbed, a small clump of ‘rainforest’ sprang up in five years. Owls came to nest in the trees, a leopard found its way to the thick brushwood, then came bees and wasps. One day hundreds of bats came and colonized the trees along the stream. Birds of various hues homed in. A whole new mysterious world had sprung up in the farm.
An important lesson I learnt from nature was that a successful harvest is directly related to the presence of an optimum number of insects in the cultivated field. As students we were told that 80 per cent of our food crops were cross-pollinated. Insects are the inadvertent pollinators. They visit millions of flowers for nectar and pollen, which is their food, and in so doing, deposit grains of pollen between individual plants and thus cross-fertilize them. There are millions of insects and millions of varieties of flowers. Each insect has evolved to relate to a particular species of flower. The balance in nature thus created is quite delicate and it is absolutely essential for farmers not to upset the local ecology. The crop that a farmer grows gets pollinated only incidentally; the insect’s principle goal is to locate its specific flower and savour its nectar. Therefore, by indiscriminate destruction of existing flora, the ignorant farmer actually lessens the prospect of a good yield at the outset. Scientists are still researching the relationship between particular insect varieties and particular flora.
One example of the unforeseen consequence of the blanket use of chemical pesticides is that of the spider. The spider can become the unintended victim of chemical spray. Spiders perform various roles on the farm. By laying their webs at various levels, they act as physical barriers to a variety of insect predators. There are many species of spider and harming them actually removes a friendly species from the farm environment.
An insect is a cross-pollinator and a useful natural assistant to the farmer. While acknowledging the insect’s positive role, the farmer must also be willing to allow the insect to eat and not go hungry. It will eat what is readily available: the leaf of the crop the farmer is growing. This is a trade-off. A caterpillar eats leaf. There are a thousand varieties of caterpillars, that become moths or butterflies. The butterfly is a pollen courier, so if you get rid of the leaf-eating caterpillar, you also lose the butterfly. We cannot therefore eliminate insects and have a great crop.
The people of Gorur once ate fish caught from the river. Today, there are no fish. There were little ponds in every village where fish were reared for local consumption, the fish pond serving as a common village resource. Now we have commercially operated fisheries and the poor have no fish to eat. The use of weedicide, pesticide, and other chemical agents on farms has had a deleterious effect on riverine fauna. There are frequent media reports of fish coming out of the water and dying on riverbanks in thousands. Every piece of the earth is home to many varieties of plant and animal life. Forests, wildernesses, grasslands, the open plains, the water marshes, and cultivated land with its natural and artificial hedges are habitats for life of all species. The same applies to the fringes of human habitation and human habitats themselves, including villages, towns, and urban outskirts. The human habitat is slowly eating into the natural habitat of plant and animal life. Species become extinct as this pincer movement colonizes m
ore land from the wild. The newly ‘captured’ land, flatteringly described as ‘development’, is subject to the creation of new urban habitats and new farming. The methods used to reserve more land for agriculture, horticulture, and animal husbandry are predominantly chemical-driven. Overall, there is an alarmingly massive use of chemicals everywhere, which leach into the soil, ruin natural water reserves, and run into surface waterbodies such as lakes and rivers, and eventually the sea. The result is a slow poisoning of the earth.
In 1984, Rotary International invited nominations of people from four different fields to attend a scholarship programme in the US. They chose a doctor, a banker, a lawyer, and a farmer. I was the farmer selected for this group. The programme comprised visits to American farms. The scholar would be enabled to experience at first-hand, farming techniques in vogue in that country. I stayed for six weeks in the US and visited Vermont and New Hampshire. I did gather some useful farming practices but also came across a phenomenon at one American farm that shocked me. That experience reaffirmed my faith in natural farming and I became a dyed-in-the-wool convert overnight.
I belong to a generation that has always held rivers in awe and reverence. I have looked upon them as sacred, which have sustained life and cleansed people of their material and moral trespasses. I have looked upon the river as the embodiment of all that is pure. A single dip in one was sufficient for me to emerge clean and spiritually energized. In my childhood the river in Gorur was a constant draw: it was the undercurrent of my life. For us boys, it was the most natural thing to rush off to the river at the slightest pretext. When thirsty, we simply cupped our palms, scooped up water, and drank the sweet-tasting, crystal-clear water. My father was not a ‘believer’ in the normal sense of the word, but even he seemed to me to have had an implicit, unspoken, spiritual bond with the river. My mother and the other ladies of the village also deified the river, but they related to it on a more day-to-day basis. They walked in a group to the bank of the river, unfailingly, every morning and every evening of their lives. They filled their copper pitchers and pots, did their washing, chatted about each other’s lives, and brought back the same, delicious water for cooking and drinking.
Two recent personal experiences have made me realize the irredeemable extent to which we have polluted our water sources. On a visit to Delhi a few years ago, a friend of mine took me to what he called a riverside farm house. We sat on the patio of the farmhouse chatting. I was eager to see the river because a river gave me a spiritual high. We walked perhaps a hundred steps to the river. I expected to see a river flowing majestically, with trees along the banks. I believed I would see bends in the river, little ripples of water lapping the banks, birds, insects, and a myriad of plants and aquatic life. The sun was setting and I should have seen, framed against the crimson of the horizon, the silhouette of birds swooping down on the river for a catch. I certainly did not expect what I actually saw. It was an appalling spectacle of a black, slushy, marshy, viscous mass of fluid meandering and losing its way among an archipelago of half-dried up beds of part-silt, part-plastic, and what looked like rotting semi-processed fabric and other solid urban wastes. The nondescript mass had nothing life-giving about it. It looked like a purveyor of death and disease. I asked my friend which river it was. He said without emotion, ‘Oh! It is the Yamuna!’ My heart sank, my soul imploded. It was the greatest blow to the image of a river that I had deified as a boy. I asked myself how human civilization could even hope to sustain itself into the future if this was how we treated our ancient, sacred rivers.
The other experience was in the US. On one of my visits, a farmer told me he did not drink water dug from his farm or from the stream running alongside. I found it impossible to believe that anyone could be so distrustful about water from a well or river. I found it impossible to believe that water could be poisoned. This visit took place over twenty years ago. India had a very little concept of packaged water. My host informed me that chemical analysis of water samples from depths of 100–150 metres had shown that they were completely polluted, and contained harmful compounds far above the permissible levels. The cause of this pollution, as I was to discover, was the ‘no till’ farming ideology that farmers had been practising.
In ‘no till’ agriculture the farmer applied a thick blanket of weedicide over the field after every crop. This approach stemmed from ignorance of the meaning of the term ‘weed’. What’s a weed? One definition, ascribed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, is: ‘A weed is a plant whose useful properties have not been discovered yet’. A weed is therefore an integral part of the eco-system and to maintain the balance, you have to recycle the weed back to nature.
US agricultural scientists had discovered this technique of completely destroying weeds. A ‘no till’ planter sowed seeds for the next crop of maize or wheat. The new agricultural cycle began with the weedicide. It was followed by chemical manure and chemical pesticide. Chemicals in their most virulent forms were getting into the soil. They were then being washed into waterbodies. The water as it flowed in channels, streams, and rivers gathered more of this chemical and became completely undrinkable. It was true, however, that American farmers managed very high crop yields, but at what cost? That surely is not sustainable farming.
Not only for modern-day farmers but for all of us as stakeholders of this planet, I would like to take the liberty of quoting, at length, Lewis Thomas. Thomas says:
It is not a new thing for man to invent an existence that he imagines to be above the rest of life; this has been his most consistent intellectual exertion down the millennia. As illusion, it has never worked to his satisfaction in the past, any more than it does today. Man is embedded in nature. The biological science of recent years has been making this a more urgent fact of life. The new, hard problem will be to cope with the dawning, intensifying realization of just how interlocked we are …. A good case can be made for our non-existence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied … by little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, embedded inside us they have maintained themselves and their ways replicating in their own fashion, privately with their own DNA and RNA, quite diff erent from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought …. I am consoled, somewhat, by the thought that the green plants are in the same fix …. The viruses, instead of being single-minded agents of disease and death, are now beginning to look more like mobile genes. We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart rather like bees from organism to organism, from plant to insect, to mammal to me, and back again and into the sea ….
By observing the primeval forest, talking to older farmers, and reading people like Lewis Thomas I realized that we as modern-day farmers approached insects in isolation as pests and tried to eliminate them with all the tools and pesticides at our command. The ants are the biggest foragers of the soil. They create the soil even as they look for food. As they work, and they work incessantly, they loosen the soil, they process and sift dead insects in the soil, and enrich it by the juices of the dead and the living.
I learnt more about ants from experience. One day I returned home with thirty bags full of seeds. These bags contained insects that were steadily boring into the seed sheath and eating the food from within. Many of the insect-bored seeds were hollow and crumbled easily. I opened the bags and spread the seeds on the floor to air them. When I returned I found as many insects as there were grains. I saw a line of ants heading to and from the seed mass. I was a little dismayed that an ant attack was in progress, but on closer observation I saw that the ants were carrying away not seeds but the insects that had infested the seeds. The ants were preying on the insects and nature had provided me with the best possible pesticide! I sensed i
mmediately and intuitively that this must hold the key to making farming natural yet productive and viable.
I made it a point to visit farms in the neighbourhood as well as villages some way off to observe farming practices. Kolar, Chamarajanagar, and Kunigal are silkworm-rearing areas. During my trips to hundreds of farms, there was one common denominator: all the farms, notwithstanding very heavy doses of chemical manure, were unable to get good quality and abundant quantity of mulberry leaves. The result was that they were repeatedly losing silkworm crops because of the poor nutritional quality of the leaf. The breed of silkworm which has made Karnataka famous for its silk over the centuries fed on mulberry leaves, a perennial crop. However, the use of heavy chemical manure in recent years had completely rendered the soil sterile and toxic, resulting in a point of no return and pushing thousands of farmers into poverty.
Farmers are advised to put in nitrogen through urea, potassium through potash, and phosphorous through phosphates. These are the three principle ingredients used along with other micronutrients. The soil has to be in a particular condition, which the traditional farmers know by intuition. They know that the tree is its own food. The tree cannibalizes its post-mortem. However, this is a law of nature, and there is nothing morbid about it. Therefore, if you have a coconut tree, you actually have the tree stem, the frond, the flowers (inflorescence), and the fruit, including the husk, the shell, and the copra. All that the farmer needs to do is to take the copra and give everything else back to the tree. This wisdom is not even about science. It simply enjoins you not to sell or burn what you consider to be the waste of the coconut tree. Instead, it suggests, that you put all of it back as happens in the forest where the rotting fallen trunk, frond, and nut continually enrich the soil.
We had been, on the one hand, selling off both coconut husk and leaves, and on the other, were paying to buy manure for the coconut trees. Therefore, in the light of all the new knowledge I had acquired, one day I told my workers not to remove anything from the coconut grove. I asked them to leave all the fallen remains of the trees where they were. Miraculously, we found that termites had stopped attacking the coconut trees and were now feeding on the waste material around them.
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