A bunch of Permaculturists / zero-farming enthusiasts will meet tomorrow in Bangalore. There is no specific agenda. This is more of a get to know each other meeting besides the common theme that all participants are interested in some form or other of sustainable farming.

Venue: Cubbon Park M.G.Road entrance (opp. Jewels de Paragon building)
Start time: 10:00 AM
Date: 13 June 2009

Personally, I have the following three specific questions to the participants:

1. Why are you interested? What got you started? What have you done thus far?
2. What are you looking forward to?
3. Can we do anything locally while we're still in Bangalore? (I have a couple of ideas that we can work on, either together or distributedly: From transforming the "ornamental" gardens of the various IT Parks to a few Guerrilla gardening ideas).

... And, If you have any heirloom seeds or demonstrable interesting hacks or pictures / illustrations, used books related to gardening/farming/nature ("One Straw Revolution"? :) ) or any other interesting materials that you'd like to share / show, please do bring it along! I emphasize One straw revolution because I myself had difficulty obtaining a copy in Bangalore. I had to resort to ordering an imported edition off an online book retailer.

All are Welcome.

In my 1 week vacation at Thanjavur, I basked in the glory of so many birds and insects and night-sky stars, walked distances, talked to a lot of people besides catching the typical cold that I tend to catch everytime I go to the country side.

I met one Mr.Meenakshi Sundaram of the Tamil Nadu Organic Certification Department (TNOCD) in Thanjavur. In my interaction I got to know about the process of obtaining "Organic food" certification. "TN is India's first state to come up with a government body for Organic certification", claimed Mr.MS.

I also had long discussions with poor farmers. The simplicity with which they narrated stories of exploitation during the past flood in Thanjavur set me out to wonder how these poor farmers can be liberated from the clutches of the oppressing mindsets of the 'upper classes'. It is somehow a matter-of-fact to the upper-classes to shun the lower classes inspite of knowing very well deep inside that their 'owned lands' will be wasted without their toiling in the scorching sun.

I also have been talking to some organic farmers. I've read a lot of success stories of organic farmers in Tamil Nadu on Pasumai Vikatan and the likes. Organic farming in principle is noble and is important for a food producing nation like India to adopt. Afterall, India inspite of being the world's second largest producer of rice, trades very little and consumes most of what it produces. So if feeding oneself is vital, doing so in an independent, sustainable way should play a large role in the food production strategy of India. A democracy is by the people and for the people. When the government is going after the poor farmer's votes, it is important that we understand whether the poor farmer benefits from the TNOCD.

Before we get into the regulations put forth by TNOCD, let me explain Organic Farming.

Organic farming
Simply put, organic farming is all about using naturally available plant and animal resources (and hence the term 'organic') to grow food. Chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides are not used. Instead, what's termed "Farm manure" is used. To facilitate production and recycling of farm wastes into farm manure, cattle is a thumb-rule device of converting the waste into manure quickly. Pesticides are in the form of natural, bio-degradable materials (ex: typically involving garlic and/or neem oil and/or green chillies) - requires more effort and more time for the pests to be repelled (or sometimes, 'killed') but it works as effectively. That said, the term 'organic farming' is quite hazy. Especially given the "coolness" factor of Organic produce, especially in the west, Its kinda like how some (important) people came to term all the religious / philosophical ideas of a given region as "Hinduism" (including buddhism, jainism and even the Atheistic, Materialistic Carvaka philosophy). Many people I know of took to Organic farming having been inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's "Zero farming" philosophy (which has to do more with Zen than anything else). I'm not blaming those who take to Organic farming... I'm just warning the reader about the confusion that prevails around terminology. So... watch out :)

All said... It is a matter of fact that today's Industrial farming practices involve heavy fertilizer and pesticide use. This has made the soil a mere substrate where plants grow only using periodically added essential nutrients. Let's not even talk about whether we fully understand all the complex interactions in nature and whether a mere spraying of chemicals can substitute everything that is missing in this labour intensive yet biodiversity depleted method of food production. Continuous layering of chemicals alters the chemical composition so badly that the earth worms and the zillion other macro and micro-organisms are no longer around in these soils.

Such a soil devoid of the eco system needs revival and revival isn't an easy process. So it is a common notion amongst practitioners of organic farming to give a 'recovery period' during which time certain practices allow the soil to regain its fertility.

During the recovery period, the obtained yield is always lesser. Even after recovery, nothing beats, for example, IR8 rice (a HYV rice from the IRRI produced during the Green Revolution). The story is the same with industrial variety anything (Wheat, Corn, etc.,). That said, native varieties have other practical advantages like resilience to floods, better yield without chemical inputs (IR8 will yield much lesser without chemical inputs) and so on. But typically, once the recovery period is over, the quality of the yield speaks for itself. Also, since chemical inputs are not used, the input costs per harvest is highly reduced besides the input supplies becoming self-sustainable.

The TNOCD seems to have pretty much done a good job in coming up with a framework to ensure Organic farming can be done. It has also come up with a set of apparently stringent testing methodologies to reject unsafe foods and thereby revoke the certification. "The rules are based on the ISO 65 standard", says Mr.MS.

That is all good... but the point of this post is this: Who is TNOCD trying to serve? Corporations disguised as farmers? Small scale, Rich farmers? (like me and the hazaar other techie wannabe-farmers of today) or the real masses of poor farmers who are fleeing their lands to urban slums? ...and ultimately, do they want the citizens of their nation consuming safe foods or is this yet another product reserved for the elites who can afford to buy from the market?

The poor farmer's plight
TNOCD is just a Certifying authority. There is no tutoring whatsoever... and having witnessed the treatment of the 'low caste', I can imagine how approachable the bulk of the authorities will turn out to be. Also, there is no incentive to the farmer besides the certificate. These two issues of Education and Incentives are very important if they want to make India's food production sustainable by using organic means.

The poor indian farmer needs an immediate yield. The rules specified by TNOCD are so impractical for a poor farmer that he will not even think about going the organic way. The impracticality of these rules will be shortly exposed by stating a few basic widely prevailing conditions of poor farmers:

1. Poor farmers rely on their land for atleast 2/3rds of the year for sustenance.
  - The mandatory 3 year recovery period is impractical here.
  - Not certifying / incentivizing the farmer for this 3 year "loss" period is a big hurdle to adoption by the poor farmer.
  - Poor farmers typically have borrowed loans from local lenders at insanely high interest rates. Its a completely different thing that banks are unapproachable for the poor farmer and that will pull us into analysing the roots of the caste system and such. Too off-topic, i guess.
  - If the farmer, consciously or unconsciously ends up doing something that fails the test (ex: huge pest infestation and ends up reacting with pesticides OR water logged from a neighbour's non-organic farm drains into one's farm)

2. Poor farmers rely on the rain and the river for water.
  - The water will be tested. Mr.MS says this as a sad fact: "Cauvery is polluted and it will definitely fail the test. so you better get a pump". Pumps cost Rs.1,50,000/- far beyond the reach of the poor farmer (I'm not even talking about the 'hidden' bribery charges around getting power supply from the grid).
  - Open wells are multiple times expensive than bore pumps though won't require electricity (which is anyway free to the farmer). In a world where everybody uses a bore-pump drilled to 300 ft, keeping water in the open well will require a lot of rain water harvesting efforts - again, requires a lot of tutoring / aid from the government.
  - To prevent water from enter one's farm, TNOCD recommends building a 'bund'

3. Too little land
  - The programme recommends using one's land for a lot more than just growing the actual organic produce
    - A buffer zone to isolate organic produce from being affected by a neighbouring non-organic farm's pesticide/herbicide/fertilizer's effects
    - Cattle is recommended to be placed _in_ the farm. There are specifications about how much sun-light can and should be incident on the cattle, etc.,  Besides the needed protection from wild farm animals (mongooses, foxes, wild cats, etc.,), someone will have to stay around in hte farm to just take care of the cattle. During the heavy rains of the previous season, the so-called "S.C.Street" (yes, S.C. == Scheduled Caste) people had to flee since the mud walls of their houses were not withstanding the rain... that is in a liveable, non-low-lying area of the village. The land they own might be pretty far away and might be so low-lying that protection from such flooding will mean raising the land level and building a more solid house - both of which means a lot more cost.
    - Manure processing + growing some stuff for cows needs land

I can only guess the unwritten goals of TNOCD: To enable AgriBusinesses and 'Rich' farmers to foray into the niche segment of 'Organic' farming. To further the class and economic divide that has already caused much suffering in this region since time immemorial.

Consider the possibility of using these 'stringent rules' for authority, control and as means of forcing the farmer to pay up bribes to 'pass' TNOCD's tests.

Ultimately, the only selling point of this certification programme is the high profits obtainable per unit yield _after_ the recovery period, as measured today based on today's open market conditions, one can make due to (today's) demand from the open market per unit yield of organic produce. A 11th standard student will tell you what happens to price as supply increases. If the government wants people to adopt organic farming and does not take steps to protect the poor farmer who has lost his 3 year yield, the programme has lost the farmer who would probably never return to Organic farming simply because it was a bad experience to him.

From the time I got to hear about "Organic Farming" I have been of the opinion that the whole approach is short-sighted and wrongly motivated (higher price yield). This also goes to reinforce that permaculture principles will be the most practical and sustainable way for poor farmers to liberate themselves from the clutches of those in power... from those who want the poor to stay poor so they can keep making promises to get the only thing they need from these poor people - their votes.

The Deccan Development Society's successful use of permaculture in Andhra Pradesh not only liberated the oppressed classes of farmers but also enabled them to switch to cost-effective, incremental and sustainable method of food production using permaculture principles. There is nothing stopping governments from not adopting practical solution like permaculture. It is so easy to see that the poor can adapt from the success stories of community permaculture efforts in Rajasthan and Andhra.

If the politicians and society don't help the poor and oppressed amongst us, permaculture can show us how we can help ourselves. 

If this post got you significantly interested in Permaculture... or if you're even marginally curious to understand how permaculture saved the people of Andhra, do watch the "Global Gardener" documentaries ("In the tropics"). Further tid-bits and stories can be found on the Deccan Development Society website.

Bad news first...
1. The rats are back. 12 of the 22 beans plants have been destroyed completely by the rats. And like in horror movies, it started with the nursery being removed over night and that was terrifying... and since then one plant is gone every week and I'm left here standing helpless.  The remaining beans have started yielding. However, I decided to not consume the beans. As an experiment, I'm gonna let them fall off to the ground and become more beans plants without me having to plant them any further. Their job - nitrogen fixation.

Coming back to rats... A few months ago, I witnessed one of the stray cats hunt a rat. Its amazing and simple. I was expecting some heavy-duty chasing sequences. But to my disappointment (and enlightenment) there was none. It just sat in front of one of the rat holes, patiently waiting for a rat to emerge or enter without notice... spending energy only to quickly react with his sharp paws.

2. I don't know what I did wrong. But all the orb-weaving spiders are gone. I take this as a bad sign. Something I planted must have invited something else that killed the spiders off, I guess. I don't know. But I do know that the spiders were playing a good role in catching a good amount of mosquitoes and some such flies. I've hardly ever noticed the honeybees getting trapped in the spider orbs so I believe the orbs were for most parts playing a good role in pest control... But, they're gone now anyway and its time to move on. Impermanence.

Say hello
Please meet, the potential recruit for my garden - Sivarasan. The reason I'd like to call him Sivarasan is because he is one-eyed (much like the one-eyed sivarasan who was recruited to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi) and he is going to be my new Assassin to get rid of rats! The poor thing apparently lost an eye in a cat fight with another bigger cat. Our apartment folks sent it to CUPA and got him back. We've also decided to keep him in the apartment premises itself since there are enough rats in here that need his service. But I need to do a lot of things before I can recruit him to work in the garden. He is bound to dig up the soil to 'hide' his droppings which might not always turn out to be good to the plants. Though the positive way of looking at it is that he can convert the rats into manure! He is also bound to walk on top of tender sprouting new-ones and kill them. I have a couple of solutions in mind but its not necessary that things will play out as I plan them to be... and given the distributed 'forest like' setup of my garden, it might require a lot more work than I'd initially thought
The good thing is, Sivarasan gets into the garden without explicit invitation so I guess I can deal with damages caused by him as and when it happens and learn from them. 

The Story of Bee
All said, not all is bad. There are so many honey bees visiting my garden these days.


Today, I sat in the middle of the garden with the aim of finding out where the bees go. It wasn't an easy job since the bees just vanish right in front of your eyes to get to the other side where humans don't have eyes (ie., the back). But after some difficultly, I did manage to find where they were going. They were going upwards and in the direction of a nearby tree. So I think a nearby tree has recently become home to a new honey comb so that's good! 

To keep the diversity high, I don't do too much weeding unless the weeds don't flower or the weeds are 'taking over' the useful plants. I'd like to believe that this diversity of flowers is the cause of the honey-comb formation nearby and its obviously a self-reinforcing positive feed back cycle that results in the plants and bees helping each others, of which, some of the plants useful to me also benefit.

Chillies, Watermelon and watermelon bugs
The green chillies have been growing in abundance. The coriander is reasonably successful than I'd thought earlier. So is the brinjal, though none of them are yet to start flowering. A stray mutant green chilly plant was yielding very spicy chillies while the ones I had 'planned' and planted was giving not-so-spicy chillies around 2 months ago. Today, I plucked out the not-so-spicy chilly, and like a hero bit a piece. I was not only stung in my tongue but I was also enlightened. Cross-pollination, after all, has resulted in the stray mutant chilly's spicyness spread over to the otherwise bland chilly plants too.




( Some misc photos )

[Update sunson.in now has its own wiki. Let me know if you're interested in speaking. I'll give you access and you can prepare your content on the wiki.]

Oil has powered us for the past 100 years and brought us here to this day when fish can be caught in Argentina, get filleted in China and be back in the Mal-Warts of USA. Oil built roads, built the cars and enabled the cars to run. Oil is the single largest chunk of energy source today and combined with Natural Gas and coal, accounts for more than 85% of the world's energy sources. Oil gave us plastics and a wonderful world of many many polymers. Oil gave us food via Green Revolution - a system of heavy fertilizers, pesticides and mechanization use to produce surplus food that supported and spurted population growth. Oil made man sexier and gave our species a temporary edge over surpassing the carrying capacity of the ecosystem.

... but a system of continous growth cannot be powered by a finite resource forget how we could get to such a state of extreme dependence.

From my interactions with random people on this topic - from Auto drivers to friends and sometimes even strangers at random bus-stops, I have sampled four kinds of people with respect to this topic:
   - Those who think peak oil is a fad created by oil companies to drive up prices
   - Those who 'know' what peak oil is, but think its not here anytime "soon". (ie., I won't fix it, someone else, maybe my children, will) They typically quote "We have enough reserves. The tar sands, Oil shales".
   - Those who think peak oil is imminent, but believe in a "techno-fix" (these folks often quote the warnings from the earlier part of the century about how we can't grow enough food to sustain population and how the Green Revolution was a 'techno-fix'... and must I mention "Renewables and Alternatives"? ).
   - Those who think peak oil is a real threat and can have devastating consequences on the economy (a system built on the premise of continous 'growth') and on food production.

Wouldn't it be worthwhile setting up an Unconference types meeting with five groups addressing each set of people mentioned above? Maybe you have a point to make. Maybe you'd just like to volunteer. Or maybe you wanted to understand everything more clearly.

I used to do some amount of enthu work for Free Software and such when I was in college / beginning my 'career'. Back then, the situation was different. I had a lot of time and no money. Now its all inverted - I have hardly any time but enough money to help fund this activity (atleast in part). Back then, I volunteered away all my time for a cause that I thought was worth it. But the said cause seems dwarfed by the size of challenges that we'll have to face as the total available energy goes into a terminal decline. How happy and harmless am I if I'm killing off the next generation due to ignorance?

I can definitely prepare posters on Gimp. If need be, I can take a day off. I already have a few posters on the topic that I printed from the US Dept of Energy website (But some of it is US specific). I have some more simpler, catchy poster ideas too. I have some topic ideas and with your ideas combined, we might just make a blast of the opportunity.

Let's get talking.

My LJ account will now be tweet-pollution free going forward. My twitter account will continue to exist but you won't see the daily twitter updates appear on this journal anymore.

There are only three reasons for this:
1. Makes my other what-i-want-the-world-to-read-and-comment-on blog posts difficult to navigate to. Too much noise from twitter. Atleast I visit blogs once in a while to 'catch up' and 'daily tweets' makes it difficult to catch up on real posts from the past.
2. Get myself to write real LJ posts and break free from the 140-chars-per-post prison.
3. There is a reasonable sized list of folks who complained about these 'daily twitter updates' (yes, that includes you too - deponti  :) ). My friends list contains atleast 4 daily twitter updates!

Stop polluting. Save LJ.

• 20:43 Here's my own cocktail recipe: 1xRum + 1xCoconut water + 1xCola + 0.25xMango Juice == an awesome chocolatey flavoured drink! #

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• 18:16 Given #IPL is going to be around for a while and that I don't follow it... maybe I should stop using twitter given all the spam. stop it! #
• 18:33 Unfollowed @m_mekin, @avinashatreya to clean up #ipl spam. How useful a tweet is "There you go, Kallis at it again"? #
• 19:20 Based on the excellent germ hypotheses from War of the Worlds, I conclude "Time Machine" to be flawed. The germs will kill time travellers. #

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• 07:18 Damn the rats. 12 beans plants _completely_ removed. No trace. Looks like that one 'visiting' cat isn't enough. Need snakes, perhaps. #
• 07:42 WTF is a God-believing Naturalist? #
• 11:14 "Will I still get my AOL discs in the mail? I almost have enough to make a solar parabolic amplifier death ray." tinyurl.com/dhnw3f #
• 15:39 HOW/WHY THE F did facebook decide to change my language to tamil? This is both creepy and awesome. #

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• 17:26 Just when I was dreaming a sci-fi fiction story of crude, low power NASA-style robots farming lands... tinyurl.com/dg2buj #

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• 07:24 Had an awesome time with college friends yesterday night. #

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• 10:31 My mind isn't flexible enough anymore to unlearn and relearn the guitar using the EADGBE tuning. Won't give it up so soon. #
• 12:07 (Professionally) printing this cool "primordial soup" poster for self: www.mbio.ncsu.edu/JWB/PrimordialSoup.jpeg (480kb, jpeg) #
• 13:57 I wish delicious normalized its URLs. For the current search of 'science' + 'poster' tags, everything is just one poster essentially. #

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One of the bits in my head flipped permanently at some point of my learning music - it was when I could identify ragas. It really is so. There are guesses, at first... and then after a point of time, you just know it. You no longer think about what ma it is or what ri it is - some ragas just say "Hi, I am kanada". A bit flips permanently allowing you to identify ragas.

I guess another kind of bit flipped recently. I recently bought an acoustic guitar from Thulasi musicals. After the first few days of intense playing... since yesterday, my fingers just somehow know where to go. I'm not adept yet. I can't move around fast. But I can go to the right 'spots'. I just know the note, not as 'words' (ri, ga, C, etc.,) but as points on the guitar. I guess, becoming very talented and adept will be one more bit flip. I'm probably not entirely there yet, but I can see, with enough practice things just fall into place.

About the Guitar Like every other Tulsi guitar, its a work of art. The first day of the finger board surfing was a little rough but not sure if it was the 5 hours straight session and/or something with the fingerboard itself - it has since been very smooth. Almost like an expensive electric's finger board!

• 09:53 #ipl makes me want to unfollow quite a lot of people. wouldn't it be nice if I could filter out certain tags? #

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• 11:01 So it did indeed rain... The plants, therefore, were watered three times in the past 15 hours! #

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• 05:58 When ICICI sends mailers claiming "Gold is a safe investment because its value has been growing in the past", its time for a gold bubble. #
• 07:05 mind42.com is an awesome free collaborative mindmapping app #
• 20:51 Showing the most successful prank I've ever done to Deepti... umm... well, maybe not as successful as the one I pulled on her. #

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• 19:27 I. hate. @ankitag. and. @shivku for tweeting that I'm leaving Yahoo!. Damn pranksters. #

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• 02:21 Ideally, I want a board on my patch of land that says: You can eat all that you want from this land but you MUST USE THIS COMPOSTING TOILET! #

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• 08:50 Figured out an ideal position / thrust to use to directly eject spilled food on my keyboard into the trash. One click cleanup. Must patent! #
• 09:14 Obama succumbs once again. Will Monsanto pwn the land of Milk and Honey(sic)? tinyurl.com/dhq2ay #
• 11:37 Got my new acoustic guitar from Thulsi. The joy of a working G string! #
• 14:14 Why? Why? Why use 'goto'? #

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• 10:52 I suddenly find a lot more molecular biology related 3D vidoes on #youtube. Watching stuff about mitochondria and protein transport now. #

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• 07:10 Bitten by ants for the 10th consecutive day. Probably my legs might rot and fall - what with the perennial redness/blotches on my foot! #

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