Back to Work at Cumbum Valley

Hello Friends,

Cumbum Valley is returning to normal. Bus services between Cumbum and Kumili have restarted today albeit with fewer services....Our Supervisors have started coming to the fields from Saturday last and today we harvested some Banana and did a sale. Our labour will start coming in from tomorrow to do some weeding and transplanting work. We will be proceeding cautiously and under the radar and increasing the tempo to the level of  the earlier days only over the course of next two to three weeks.

Wishing everyone a Happy and Prosperous 2012.

Rajesh

Mullaperiyar and Work - an Interim Update

Hello Friends,

We have not had any untoward incidents at our farms and we have been able to continue with our routine maintenance work uninterrupted till date.We have a worker from the local village itself who has been attending to work right through this difficult time. Ours may be the only Keralite farm in the area where maintenance could be looked after.

Today we are discussing re commencement of work with the support of neighbouring farmers and some of the local village people and we hope to start with some transplanting operations from our trial nurseries soon. Our Supervisors who are locals as I mentioned earlier are doing the talking to get things moving again.

Cumbum Valley and Theni District has not come back to normalcy and there are periodic demonstrations and protests taking place. Appeals made by respective Chief Ministers for calm yesterday is expected to have some effect as per feed back from local people and we await to see how the situation progresses. I think the waters will remain choppy for some more time but feel we will be able to navigate out of the situation safely over the coming few weeks.

Thanks
Rajesh

Mullaperiyar Reverberations

Hello Friends,

Presumably all of you are seeing the media coverage of the impact of the agitations on this issue in the Cumbum Valley area. We have not had any problems at our farms as of date and things seem to be cooling off now. However many farms owned by Keralites have suffered damages on infrastructure, equipments and standing crops.

Some of the steps we had taken right from the beginning may have stood to our advantage. We employ  hundred percent local employees including supervisors. We have maintained good relationships with our neighbouring farms and have worked together with them for common causes.We have carried with us a very influential local person who helped us consolidate the holdings and still work closely with him and so on and so forth.

Work on all farms are at a standstill since last Sunday which is the last time we could visit the farm as traffic between the states still remains disrupted. Local activists discourage local workers from going to and working on Keralite farms and with the workers not being able to cross the border to work on Cardamom estates in Kerala there is also a developing distress which should all favour a quick resolution of the local interstate movement and work related issues hopefully.

Work is light at this period because of winter months. Our early season nursery is starting to become ready for replanting and we have started doing this in a small way yesterday with one local worker who is on our rolls. However we need to be planting our main nurseries within the next two weeks to be able to plant for the next cropping season by mid January and we are hoping that issues would get sorted out by then.

Will keep you posted through this site more frequently in December till such time as things return to normalcy. We believe our investments  can pass through this phase safely and continue with our plans albeit by arranging for more local  participation in managing the farms and more transfer of knowledge to local supervisors for implementation on the field.

We are adjusting suitably and proactively and will keep updating progress.

Thank you
Rajesh

Cumbum Valley Farms in November

Hello Friends,

It rained heavily right through October and into the third week of November extended by a week as a result of  a depression off Kanyakumari as the Met office reports. In the third week we decided to risk planting a vegetable nursery and got caught in the depression induced rain. The nurseries survived the rain with some timely temporary covering with left over thatching material from our cowshed building. All neighbouring farms will start their nurseries only after the middle of December which is the normal duration of the North  East monsoon in these parts. Our main nurseries will also be done only at this time.

However we took advantage of the rains to plant about five hundred sticks of Gliricidia Sepium, a leguminous tree which is a nitrogen fixer as well as a prolific producer of green manure in terms of leaves which can be ploughed into the soil to increase the organic content..a new thought induced by our exploration of alternate farming methods. We have also planted about two thousand seeds of Sesbania Grandiflora in our nursery, another tree for similar purpose.All these will be planted along the borders of the farms to supplement the farm with organic material for improving the fertility of the farms.

Our background research continues to make progress and I am personally convinced now that Natural Farming is the way to go in the long term. In this mode the input costs are kept at negligible levels, the soil fertility is enhanced progressively and the yield levels keep increasing and get as good as modern methods with the difference that yields are obtained with very little input costs on the fertilizer and pesticides front. This is not Organic Farming because that involves certification and also purchase of inputs by way of organic fertilizers and organic pesticides again leading to high input costs which is what we need to get around to achieve consistent yield and profitability.

We have sold a second lot of bananas from our first crop but the price realization remains depressed with a realization of rupees five a kilo..another reason we have to keep costs low in the future so that crops remain profitable even if prices periodically swing down.

We are going to be addressing the weeding labour costs next crop cycle by substituting mulching to avoid weed growth rather than allow it to grow and then employ labour to remove them. Traditionally paddy straw was used for mulching but with combined harvesters coming into vogue straw is left in the paddy field itself. So what we are going to do is  to keep two acres of land to grow forage grass and cut and dry that and use that to cover the soil around our vegetable plants to contain weed growth.

I think our test farm will be very educative as we will be testing out a lot of concepts out here to gain first hand knowledge..regretfully technical consultant types in agriculture seemed to have only one thinking pattern which is to apply petrochemical derivative NPK..Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium in its chemical form and apply ever increasing quantities of more and more costly and poisonous pesticides to wipe out ever more resistant mutants of pests.

I have come across a video of an Indian Follower of Masanobu Fukuoka, Shri Bhaskar Save of Gujarat which I link to below for the benefit of those of you who may be interested in knowing more about this.

Our Pre Season Nursery

More later.

Rajesh

Overview of October

Hello Friends,

Monsoons hit the farms on the twenty first of the month and we completed harvesting the remaining tomatoes and brinjals. The rains come in strong bursts in the afternoons and are very heavy. We now only have our Banana plants in the farm and the vegetable fields will be re planted only in January from a nursery which will be planted in December. Transplanting is done after the seedlings are about thirty to forty days old depending on the vegetable. November and December are cold months and vegetables do not grow well in this area as per local farmers and so we wait for January. We could have tried some cold season vegetables like cabbages and cauliflower but since these are prone to heavy pest infestations we decided we would do this next season after we get a better grip on alternate pest and disease control measures.

Talking of alternative practices we have come across very promising alternatives which we have further explored by visits. Farms following these models are impressive enough to have convinced us to set apart one two acre plot for trying these practices. Farm animals are part and parcel of these forms of farming and so we decided to commission a cattle shed and we have populated this with one indigenous cow to start with;which you can see in the picture below.

For those interested to know more you could check out the video below. Masanobu Fukuoka has written a classic book called the "One Straw Revolution" and he has many followers in India and abroad.

Indian followers have innovated further and we now have farmers practicing low input farming depending primarily on farm animals, composts and green manure to grow healthier plants which withstand pest and disease attacks better just as a healthy human being is more resistant to diseases and infections they say.

Anyway we intend to try a full range of crops both vegetables, bananas and fruits in the trial two acre plot that we have set apart now for these experiments in alternate farming methodologies.

Here is our brand new cattle shed built in traditional local style and captioned to suit the the farming practice we intend to follow here. 

Sustainability of precision farming which is a form of chemical farming is strongly questioned by followers of these Natural Farming methodologies and they say that worldwide there is a trend to move away from Chemical Farming. Anyway November being a light month for farm activities we are going to be spending a lot of time researching alternatives and trying to find the best path to grow healthy marketable crops.

Bye till the next post.

Rajesh

Status in September

Hello Friends,

The August trend continued in September. Tomatoes continued to produce well, Brinjal production showed declining trend due to continued presence of root and shoot borers. The fields where Pole Beans and Musk Melon had earlier been planted had been planted with a green manure Nitrogen fixing crop. It was intended that this crop would be ploughed into the soil just before flowering to increase the fertility of the soil for the coming crop. Photographs of the green cover can be seen below. As we explore alternatives we discover that covering the ground with green cover prevents growth of weeds and acts as a mulch enriching the soil. One of the main components of labour input costs is weeding in the farming method we had been following and we are starting to see a way to cut this by at least fifty percent by adopting green mulching which we will definitely explore in the next crop cycle.

Our exercise in exploring options and alternatives for agriculture with lower input costs and natural and biological pest control methods have opened up interesting new avenues. Visits to farms and farmers and research on unconventional and newer ways of farming ( actually a continuation of ancient methods )  are throwing up interesting new options. We will incorporate all the practices we can, progressively into our farms. Sustainability of using of Chemical Fertilizers and Pesticides is one theme that we have come across repeatedly and hence an area we are studying in more depth now.

The journey continues and we hope to overcome the hiccups in the next crop cycle. The Cumbum valley gets more than sixty percent of its rains from the North East Monsoon which is expected to set in by the second or third week of October and the  next vegetable planting season will be post the monsoon showers which is expected to go on till mid November.

Rajesh

August in Retrospect

Hello Friends,

August was a good month from the production perspective. We seemed to be getting a good crop of healthy tomatoes from the two acres we planted. Perhaps we should have sown our crop about two months earlier to have got the crop before the monsoon but otherwise things were fine.However there had been a nagging concern in that we have had to be using pesticide sprays quite regularly right from the time of transplanting of the seedlings to have been able to get this good crop. We need to assess the cost of inputs seriously because some of the pesticides we used were really expensive especially the one we were asked to use against a kind of wilt which could be seen to start developing in the morning and by evening the plant would have collapsed.The spray was a miracle cure but a very expensive one !

Brinjal's we had two varieties the long green ones seemed to repeat the cycle of a very healthy first month followed by an overwhelming attack by Root and Shoot Borer worms the ones sought to be addressed by BT Brinjal. The long green variety seemed to succumb more easily than the purple variety. As per our consultants advise we kept a steady barrage of pesticide sprays but going by the trend the long green variety may not survive the pest attack.

So we had two acres of yielding brinjal's and two acres of tomatoes as we traversed August to September. Bananas were all doing well and coming up well and our first planting of Bananas were maturing and getting ready for harvesting and the bunches looked good with the possibility of each bunch being in the region of thirty to thirty five kilos.

On the price realization front for tomatoes it was not a happy story because unlike in the previous year the price never picked up by Mid August as expected and we were selling ex farm at prices below four per kilo on an average. We had twenty tons of tomatoes sold in August at this price.

In conclusion August was a month of mixed results..good harvests..disappointing price realizations..a rising concern on input prices. We are going to be doing a lot of study on alternate modes for pest control like using natural pesticides, deployment of pheromone traps for Brinjal to see how we can address the issues of concern.

Below are some visuals for the period..

Till next time then.
Rajesh