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| Nature call |
| Lucano Alvares / New Delhi Mar 15, 2009, 00:18 IST |
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How a do-nothing farmer went on to become a farming consultant.
 I spent a year in Oaxaca, Mexico, with an NGO called Universidad de la Tierra (University of the Earth), or Unitierra. It was founded by Gustavo Esteva (a “de-professionalised intellectual”) with friends who were deeply dissatisfied with young people’s experience with institutionalised education. They promoted self-directed learning, with an emphasis on close contact with the real world and community life. People of all ages and from all backgrounds were welcome, as long as they had a desire to learn something (or sometimes, not even that). There, I got involved in publication, translation and interpretation, editing, and teaching English, and also had my first brush with farming.
I had a strong interest in anarchist thinkers, having read Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work and Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Laziness. I shared my ideas at a weekly seminar held at Unitierra, and as part of the discussions, Gustavo spoke about a text Gandhi had written about the Duty of Bread Labour. In this short piece, written for the Harijan in 1935, he states that it is the responsibility of each person on this planet to work to produce his or her own food. If everyone were to do this, he declares, millions of people would be liberated from the drudgery of producing food for others. This made sense to me, and when I started seeing Isa, who also worked there, we both decided that we would look for a place where we could grow our own food.
She already had worked with rural communities in setting up backyard farming, and integrating fruit and vegetable cultivation with raising of livestock — all on a small scale. The last time I had planted something must have been in school when everyone plants a chickpea to see how it germinates, so I started reading up on alternative methods of growing food. I was particularly impressed by Masanobu Fukuoka and his do-nothing method of organic farming.
We started looking for land where we could start, and soon heard from a group of brothers who ran an organisation called COVORPA. They had some land on the outskirts of the city, where they raised goats and quails, and they would be able to spare us an acre.
We began to look around for people who would help us — who’d be willing to engage in some bread labour — and formed a rag-tag bunch of friends and students from Unitierra. There was this Canadian who’d driven down all the way from Canada in his old VW caravan, and who worked in Oaxaca on alternative technologies, particularly solar ovens, which he built for rural communities for the purpose of baking cocoa beans. Everyone called him Chivo (“the goat”), and he would transport us to and from the farm. Then there was Drakula, at whose home I was staying, Kiado, from the indigenous community of Yagavila, and some American students who had come as part of a study abroad programme with whom the people at Unitierra didn’t know what to do. We travelled to the farm three times a week, and Isa and I had to carry enough food for the whole group, since we would be there all day.
There was a well in the centre of the field, but no electricity, so plans were made to build and install a bicycle-operated rope pump. We would start with a form of agriculture practised since Mesoamerican times, called the milpa, where nutritionally and environmentally complementary crops (principally the “Three Sisters” — maize, beans, and squash) are grown together, since this was a rain-fed crop. We would try out other methods of agriculture later, including the do-nothing farming of Fukuoka.
We set about in earnest, buying supplies second-hand and building a shed over the well where the rope pump would be installed. We also hired a tractor to plough the field, and bought seeds which we sowed ourselves. It was quite an experience. There was some rain, and the seeds were beginning to germinate, when all of a sudden I was informed by the immigration authorities that I had 30 days to leave the country. The farm had to be abandoned as the others lost interest once it was clear that we would no longer be involved.
I returned to India together with Isa, who was now my fiancée. A month after arriving, we were already working as “organic farming consultants”, managing a 50-acre farm near Pune with the aim of providing food for 200 people on a daily basis. Things were going well — until the financial crisis blocked our finances. So, we moved to Goa where we have found ourselves a place with a garden where we plan on continuing to grow our own food.
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