Why are the bees dying?

Your blogger has just moved to Switzerland. A little known fact about Switzerland is that it has the highest number of beekeepers per capita in the world. But the bees are not doing well lately. This year 22% of them failed to make it through the winter. This is strikingly similar to what is happening in the United States since 2006 with beekeepers reporting losses of between 30%-90%. A small percentage of bees die off each winter in Europe and the United States just as a small percentage of them fail to make it through the tough Indian summer. However, losses at this level are unprecedented.

The term Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) or Fall-Dwindle Disease has been coined to describe these catastrophic losses and a number of possible causes are being studied. These include factors that have been around earlier too - climate change, diseases including a virus borne by the varroa mite, and poor food and water availability. Some of the possible causes are novel to our epoch – pesticides, contaminated water, mobile phones and stress due to travel! Bee numbers are going down even as the demand from fruit farmers for their pollination services is going up. As a result bee boxes are being trucked around more than ever.

Why should we care if the bees are dying? After all many species are disappearing literally every minute. If we can't have honey, we could survive with maple syrup or treacle. However, it will not be easy to replace the hardworking bees when it comes to pollination. It is estimated that one-third of our food comes from plants pollinated by the bees. No wonder, Einstein is reported to have said that f the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would only have four years of life left.

What is common to all the new factors that could be contributing to the bee deaths is our inability to let the bees be through our agriculture practices. Conversely, the single most important step we can take to save the bees is to change the way we farm. Using less pesticides and chemical fertilizers is a no-brainer but what is not so obvious is the need to rethink monoculture as well as beekeeping itself. If all you have are fields of wheat for miles around, naturally you will have to veil your bees, load the bee boxes into a truck and take them to where the mustard is. When the mustard finishes, you take the bewildered bees to the next 'feeding station'. An expert at the oldest honey bee keeping training centre in India told me that bee keepers from Punjab are taking their bees as far down south as Andhra Pradesh. In the U.S., bees from the Mid West are not uncommon in the almond fields of California. On the other hand if you cultivate biodiversity on the farm and you eschew chemicals, you keep the bees happy through the year and you meet your pollination needs locally and without expending hydrocarbons.

The bees with their unique social organisation are a measure of the health of our agrisystems. They are like the canary in the coal mine, dying to tell us that things are going to go horribly wrong. It is for us to take the message. Some of the things stressing them out to death seem to be uncannily familiar.

Amandeep S Gill, farmersfirst@gmail.com

 

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“Do nothing agriculture”

Japanese natural farming pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka talks of the ideal of 'do nothing' agriculture. For him this is a spiritual principle, the Zen 'mu', as much as a practical guideline for the practice of sustainable agriculture. No chemical inputs, no genetic manipulation, no machines and no cultivation. In his small farm in Shikoku he consistently achieved better yields with higher biodiversity and less effort than the neighbouring fields with their intensive practice of modern agriculture. A major part of his field was devoted to orchards, wildly growing vegetables and free range poultry. The rest was planted with rice, clover and winter grain in a rotation with the chaff roughly strewn around after harvest as mulch. In India some farmers have seen in Fukuoka's precepts a reflection of the ancient 'rishi'or 'seer' agriculture which the forest seers of ancient India practiced.

 

Last month Ram and I headed out to Village Lohgarh, 30 kms from Ludhiana, Punjab's richest city. This is where the green revolution 'succeeded' beyond anyone's dreams. As we drive up we see lush green wheat fields and prosperous looking houses with cars and tractors sharing the yard space with healthy looking buffaloes. We head to the ancestral home of Tejinder Khatra. Tejinder, Teji to his friends, lives in Austria. His nephew Resham manages his 10.5 acre farm and his own dairy operation of nine buffaloes. Teji wants us to help convert his farm to organic, integrated agriculture. But first we have some convincing and rapport building to do. We soon strike a conversation with Resham about the economics of agriculture in the area.

 

If you rent out your land to another farmer as Teji has done, you earn Rupees 25,000 to 30,000 or approximately $ 600 an acre. If you farm yourself you can probably make Rs 15,000 on top of that i.e. Rs 40,000-Rs 45,000 per acre. This appears to be a sub-optimal 'wage' for the farmer who brings his labour and management skills to the equation but there are other benefits including food security at home and the ability to borrow from the grain market (The farmer's bankability depends on his ability to bring a certain amount of produce to the trader who is also often his main lender). Acoording to the law of demand and supply this seems to work.

 

The Punjab farmer is locked into an intense paddy-wheat rotation. As a rule of thumb the wheat pays off all your input costs while the paddy is your net return. Resham squeezes 2.8 to 3 tons of rice per acre which fetches him around Rs 25,000 while the wheat yield is around 1.8 tons or Rs 18,000 per acre. He plants 7-8 acres every year with paddy and wheat, an acre or so with green fodder and a small patch or two with some vegetables. His input costs – labour brought in from outside, seeds, fertilizers, herbicides, diesel and electricity – are around Rs 7000 per acre for paddy and Rs 5000 per acre for wheat. Thus, his net income from paddy and wheat is Rs 30,000 per acre. The chaff for his dairy operation, around 2.4 tons per acre or a total of nearly 17 tons for the 7 acres he planted is 'free'. We cost this at around Rs 4000 a ton. Thus to our mind his net real income from produce is close to Rs 40,000 per acre or Rs 320,000 per year.

 

Resham's dairy operation fetches him Rupees 900 a day or Rs 27,000 a month. His costs are close to Rs 12,000, of which feed (fortified unfortunately with Urea) alone is Rs 7500. Chaff and green fodder is 'free' in this integrated operation (we have already costed his chaff). His yearly income from dairy is thus around Rs 180,000. This gives a real total income of Rupees 500,000 per year or roughly Rs 50,000 per acre. This puts Resham's annual income at $ 11,000, an excellent place to be if you are an Indian farmer.

 

Is this the bench mark we are up against? No, the challenge is tougher. The latest fad in Punjab is to rent out your land to brick kiln operators who come home and hand you Rupees 75,000-100,000 per acre for two years. They scoop off the top three feet of soil, make bricks on site and sell them for a hefty profit to the ravenous construction market in Ludhiana. Why bother with planting, weeding and harvesting when you can sit at home and make nearly as much? When the brick makers hand the land back to you, you start all over again with bags of urea and packets of herbicide to help you make up for lost time. The Punjab country side is now increasingly dotted with ugly patches of scooped out land.

 

My heart sinks as I take in the consequences of this variety of 'do nothing' agriculture. It also strikes me that our challenge in 'selling' sustainable agriculture to farmers is not only the revenue comparison but also the 'effort' balance sheet. Fukuoka's bet was that natural farming could not only yield more but could also be more economical of effort. The seduction of modern intensive chemical agriculture is not only higher yields and returns but also leisure and freedom from drudgery. This has to be met with a more compelling message. A decent revenue comparison helps; a clear exposition of external costs helps too but eventually farming is about farmers. Therefore the heart of the message – the counter-ideology - has to be allure of entrepreneurship, of regaining ownership of agriculture.

 

Amandeep, Farmers First Foundation

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Compost or burn, is the choice that simple?

We held a composting workshop at the farm on December 13. Ram Singh took the trainees through Sir Albert Howard’s Indore method, the “Bangalore” method (a.k.a lazy man’s composting as you harvest the compost after 3 months without turning the heap) and vermicomposting.
The Indore method was derived more than eighty years ago from the age old traditional practices of Indian and Chinese peasants. Sir Howard, who lived in India then, was alarmed at the misuse of dried cow dung for firing the traditional chullahs or stoves. The best use of dung and for that matter any other farm waste was in his view composting so that you could return to the soil what you took out directly or indirectly through dairy animals.

This is true even today. Both traditional and green revolution farming practices have ruined soils across India. There is a fundamental need to regenerate soils by returning biomass to earth. You only have to see the dust flying around Delhi these days to realize what we have done to the topsoil, our foremost resource. However, the dung for compost versus dung for the stove dilemma is getting a new garb – mitigating climate change. The Government of Punjab, India’s richest agrarian area plans to set up 3000 MW of power capacity using 2 million tons of farm ‘waste’ or biomass. The idea is that instead of burning paddy straw in situ, farmers should be paid approximately $75 per acre for their biowaste, which would then be supplied to power plants run on biomass. Apart from generating power in a chronically undersupplied area, this would advance climate change mitigation goals and earn carbon credits. A smart green alternative to current practices, right?

From another, admittedly less fashionable perspective the best use of that straw would be for composting, mulching, litter (for dairy and poultry), starter for growing mushrooms etc. It came out of the earth, it must return there via the humble compost heap. Apart from robbing the soil, a more insidious side effect of the burn and earn approach is the reinforcing of the notion in the mind of the farmer that there is ‘waste’ in agriculture to be disposed off at the best price available. Earn Rs 3000 per acre, then spend Rs 30,000 on urea and DAP. Who wins? Who loses? Now and in the long run?

A biomass power for carbon credits scheme plays well in the current atmosphere of concern for climate change but as the venerable Nepalese magazine Himal says in a recent editorial “in the current cacophony about climate change, it is easy to forget that development – that by now beleaguered notion – has also bypassed the large majority in the region. While tackling climate change is advocated today from every podium, programmes for afforestation, water-shed development and agricultural improvement take a backseat, unless they are garbed in the language of ‘adaptation’.”

Should we do away completely with biomass energy then? I hesitate here. And in full transparency I must disclose that FFF has a technology cooperation agreement with BARC, Mumbai for a two-stage biogas plant (Nisargruna) for use with large dairy operations. I believe that in certain situations using biomass for energy is a good idea. Municipal or farm waste, which cannot be composted, and which is patently excess to local needs for soil conditioning could be an exception. However, the soil and those who depend on it must come first. Otherwise we will resolve one problem and create two more. A pattern that is now painfully obvious.

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Dec 6: Mushrooms are strange beings. They cannot be characterised as plants as they convert starch to carbohydrates and proteins without the benefit of chlorophyll or solar energy; for the mystically oriented they run on moon energy. Nor can we put them in the animal kingdom – they need a substrate to ‘grow’ and you need seeds or more precisely spawn to grow them. For our purposes – sustainable integrated agriculture – they are a key ingredient. They supplement farmers’ incomes and nutrition and they can be grown with little effort using easily available farm ‘waste’ like straw and chicken manure. Mushroom cultivation is also economical of space; a 50 kg per day unit could be set up in about 250 sqms. And they are a great way to involve women in agriculture.

In India three varieties are mushrooms are grown commercially – button mushrooms, milky mushrooms and oyster mushrooms or dhingri. Medicinal mushrooms such as the rishi mushroom are grown on a smaller scale and the gourmet mushrooms available in Japan, Europe and North America – the meaty Portobello or Shiitake for example – are rarely found.

At our Model Farm we have decided to concentrate on growing the Oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus). Our logic is that this does not require an elaborate method for preparing the compost base. Our institutional partner in this is the National Research Centre for Mushroom in Solan in the foothills of Himachal Pradesh. We buy spawn from them in one Kg bags at Rupees 60 a kilo. The starting material is paddy straw, sourced free of cost from a neighbouring farm and chopped coarsely in our chaff cutter. It is soaked overnight and then pasteurised in a drum over a traditional wood stove. Here are some images from a training session on November 15, 2009 with our self help group. Vish, Vidya and their daughter Laxmi from our consumer group chipped in. Nanya was at hand with the cameras.

We spread it out over corrugated sheets and pack it in plastic bags about 24 cms in diameter and about 36 cm in height with three layers of spawn in between. The top of the bag is closed with rubber bands or string and a few holes made at the bottom and along the sides for the excess water to come out. The bags are then placed in a room whose temperature and moisture is roughly monitored. The room is disinfected first using smoke from neem leaves. In ten days the bags turn white and after about three weeks the mushrooms start to get ready to harvest once you cut the top of the bag. It is important to keep the room safe from mice and flies. he yield improves if you spray the bags with water twice a day. Oyster mushrooms can be cultivated without fuss most of the year (you will need a shaded room with a desert cooler in summer).

Oyster mushrooms are a great source of protein and Vitamin B. They are a boost for vegetarian menus - witness the venerable Indian dish – dhingri mutter(http://www.tarladalal.com/Recipe.asp?id=203) .

Here's a happy family photo at the end of the training. Kuldeep, the lead trainer is at the centre in a black tee. Our first harvest today (Dec 6) was about two pounds.

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Sustainable Agriculture: Notes from the Ground

Oct 26: Many readers of this blog are familiar with the work of Manzil led by Ravi Gulati. He mentors groups of what we euphemistically call 'underprivileged' children and youth. The focus is on learning from the world and learning for the world (livelihood and service). Ravi says that we should never forget that books are an imperfect approximation of the world and that real learning can only be by doing. Today nearly twenty of his incredibly creative and confident students are visiting the farm with Ravi and his family.

We begin with a walk-around and talk about the various activities at the farm. Before the students plunge themselves into activity – checking out the worms, picking produce, cultivating, bathing the buffaloes and cutting chaff for growing mushrooms – we stand in a circle and share. What happens to all the produce? A few hands move over tummies. We talk about the difference between sustainably grown food and industrial food. How does the produce reach the consumers? We explain the logic of the friends of Farmers First consumer group. Why bring farmers and consumers together? This is where the discussion gets really interesting. The visitors caught the logic of better returns for the farmer quickly. But there is more. The consumer gets to look the farmer in the eye, gets to visit the place where his food is grown and thus knows that it is wholesome and nutritious. There are skills and resources he has – e-mail, internet, phones, tying up training and transport, which the farmer may not have. He can perhaps contribute to both production and marketing. The farmer has skills and knowledge, say about traditional foods, seasonal rhythms, soil and vegetation, that the city folks do not. He can perhaps help the city dweller relax and reconnect with the earth. A simple marketing channel becomes a platform for sharing.

All of us get a special treat at the end of circle time, a song on FFF composed and sung by Ram Singh, the farm manager. The lyrics in Punjabi tell the story of a farmer, burdened by debt and caught in the cycle of 'Zinc, Urea and Spray'. His wife tells him about organic agriculture, composting and FFF. He can't believe first that you can do without fertilizers and pesticides but as often happens in Bollywood he has a change of heart during the course of the song. Ram Singh ends with a comedy routine in Hindi about two mixed up radio talk shows – one on growing potatoes and the other on taking care of husbands. The girls laughed the loudest when he announced that bad (potatoes) husbands should be thrown on the compost pile.

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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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