Solitude Farm

Today, in growing heat, we took a tour of Solitude Farm in Auroville. It has a quite different approach to farming. They rotate crops within crops. For example, as one crop is about to be harvested, the next is planted within the existing crop. The old crop, once harvested, will have the plants left to rot in the field offering sustenance to the earth. They weed very little, use cows for plowing rarely and have only used mecahnical plowing once in the past 6 years.

It is run by Krishna - an ex pat Brit and his wife who are passionate about changing the way farming is done. They mulch like crazy reducing the need for water and keep the soil quite rich.

Krishna and his wife run the farm - Here he shows letuc growing in a mulched field

Much of the labour is provided by young people staying in grass huts for various lengths of time - most failry short term.

Their description is: "we are a sustainable farm in auroville, tamil nadu, south india. we grow oil seeds, lentils, vegetables, fruits, rice and millets. and we have cows...! we run an organic vegan restaurant on the farm."

One of the things that needs to be understood is that this is not an organic farm in the way we might understand it. Rather, this is antural farming based on the ideas of Masanobu Fukuoka. He believed that you could create small organic farms where there was no need to weed, apply pesticides or fertilizers nor would you have to till. He is of the view, as are the people at this farm, that organic farming is still within the same paradigm of land management that regualr farms have. They don't allow nature to do what nature is capable of accomplishing. Krishna shows, as an example, bananas growing with this method yielding the same volumes and qualities as a commercially produced tree will yiled.

Banana Tree

Wikiepedia has an interesting short article on the creator of this method - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka

Here is an example of the soil below the banana tree:

So, is this workable on a large scale? I don't know the answer but I certainly see that this community is making it work and bringing new ideas into play. They are producing sustainable crops on land that is being well managed to stay fertile and healthy.

And - for those who have never seen rice ready for harvest: