Vyasa Prasad, a swami at the Narayana Gurukula in Ooty, Tamil Nadu, tells me about agriculture and reforestation in the Nilgiri Hills of India's Western Ghats

Alaine Ball: I wanted to cover a few topics, including the farming you were doing at the Gurukula, the dry agriculture, and more on the rise of the organic movement in the Nilgiris and what you’ve seen of that in contrast to the commercial agriculture going on there, like tea and floriculture.  When did you all start growing food at the Gurukula?

Vyasa Prasad: Well, agriculture in the Nilgiris is pretty old, it starts with the coming of the British. They brought all these species of vegetables that will grow in that climate.  Otherwise, this part of the country is tropical, and would not have any of these temperate kind of vegetables.  Ooty has that special climate, they found that potatoes and cabbage, cauliflower, carrots grow very well there.  So the British brought these in here and it started as kitchen gardens really.

AB: So it didn’t start on a commercial scale?

VP: Yes, it started as kitchen gardens in peoples’ homes and then spread as wide-spread commercial farming.  But even then it was village farms that first grew these vegetables.  And the village farms would depend on either a spring, if there was a spring there, they’d use their spring water, or if there was no spring, like our place, which is on the top of a hill so there is no way to get irrigation up there.  So we depended on the rains.  Now, there is a regular pattern of rainfall.  We have convectional showers in April, and then we have the Monsoons in June.  So taking advantage of this weather pattern, we would plant potatoes.  And this was already happening when I went to the place, so it had probably been done there for the last 30, 40 years. 

AB: When did you first go to there [to the Gurukula]?

VP: ’79.  When I reached in ’79, it was a regular practice, and it was a way of getting income for the ashram.  The rooms where I’m staying, the Samadhi building, all of that was a potato field.  The top of the hill, that used to be completely a field of potatoes.

AB: Was it only potatoes?

VP: Yeah, potatoes were the preferred crop.  You would put in several bags of seed potatoes.  The field would be readied sometime in February, and in February, March, you would start using handforks, plowing up the land, making the furrows, getting the field ready for planting.  By April you wanted your seeds in the ground, preferably after the first rain.  Now in April, the rain has a convectional pattern.  That means sunny mornings, it clouds up by midday, you have a heavy shower, and then it clears up by evening.  This is almost a daily pattern.  Almost for several weeks in April.  So the slogan is, April showers bring May flowers.  By June, you might have them sprouted, but the real indication was the Southwest Monsoons in June, which came in from the West and would persist for the next month or two months with regular rain.  So that is what would basically irrigate your fields.  I don’t remember exactly when we harvested but I think it takes three months for the potato crop to be ready.  The indication was the plants die out, the green plants, they have flowers and they dry up and die out and then you know it’s ready for harvesting.  They just wither away.  And then you hire a group of people, generally women and start digging.  Start from end and have these cane baskets ready, and you keep picking and put the potatoes in your basket.  If the rains were good, you get a good yield, and you put them in a lorry and take them down to the foothills, where the wholesale market is.  And that would then see you through several months.  It was one crop a year.  This was a pattern that was followed largely in that district.  Until the 70’s or the 80’s, when the Indo-German, they started an agricultural collaboration with Germany.  The Germans came in and they introduced artificial sprinkler systems.

AB: So who started that collaboration?

VP: Germany.  It was Indo-German.

AB: Was it a government initiative?

VP: Yeah I think it was government-sponsored.  So we had a fair amount of equipment which came in from Germany.  Things like trucks and tractors and all those kind of things.  They went around and gave the farmers a fair idea of how to irrigate, how to put in sprinkler systems and irrigate their farms.  After that there was a huge leap when people started using sprinklers, and now they were not dependent on the rains anymore.  And if you had a small well on your land, or a stream somewhere, you could just put up the sprinklers and you showed off your crop.  It’s more intensive farming, almost three crops a year.  So the moment the harvesting is done, within a week, the land is prepared again for the next crop.  And it’s usually a rotation.  It would be carrots, cabbages, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, potatoes, in that order.  And then in between there are beans, and radish, and other small vegetables, beet roots.  But potato is the main thing, number one crop.  And of course this tea, many farms have converted to tea, especially those growing on the hillsides.  Though it’s a cash crop, it’s not a food crop.  It gives them also very good income, because they can pluck the leaves every 15 days or so, then send the leaves to the factories for processing.  So that’s a more recent development.

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AB: When did you start seeing the shift over to tea?

VP: Late 80’s to 90’s.  Mostly the 90’s.  There was some encouragement from the government also.  Actually, the Russian market was a very big market, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.  When the Soviet market collapses, the tea suffered a very big downswing, and now I believe it’s become somewhat steady.  But Ooty has high-grown tea, which means it has flavor, so it’s used for blending.

So if you see it chronologically then, you can see the coming of the, the original tribespeople were dairy people.  Like the Todas are mostly dairy people.  They did not have any farming practice.  The Badagas, who were from Karnataka, they are the people who do most of the farming.  They get their ideas from the Britishers, who are there from England.  Of course when they come to Ooty, they think of Ooty as a small England.  They bring seeds from their country and start kitchen gardens.  And from these kitchen gardens, the Badagas, because they are interacting with the Britishers, can use these seeds to start farming on a big scale.  So that’s how the farming grows.  And in the first stages it’s still totally rainfed.  And then comes the technological part in the 80s, when the Indo-German project introduces fertilizer and pesticides.  Potatoes especially are prone to blight.  So if there was no sunshine for a long time, the potato crop would get a blight and it would be completely destroyed.  So the spraying was introduced by the Germans.  Artificial fertilizers and then also the sprinkler systems.  So...the Nilgiris has become a source of vegetables for export to other big cities, to the urban areas.  Ooty itself now get only the rejects, the leftovers.  The vegetables from Ooty go to Chennai, Bangalore.  Ooty market itself gets the second best, those which are not good enough for export. 

In the midst of all this, the Earth Trust, which is Vanya, the Irishwoman, who, and Dr. Selvaraj from the horticulture department [of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University], I think you met him, was another concerned person, and more concern was with Vanya Orr, of Irish heritage.  She started the Earth Trust, the organic movement.  By then we were all getting concerned by the amount of pesticides and artificial fertilizers being used, especially with cabbage.  With the cabbage saplings we’d put a small pinch of DDT with the sapling [laughing].  That was going on until the DDT ban. 

AB: With your bare hands?

VP: Yeah, now they use herbicides, they kill of all the herbs with spraying.  So in the year 2000, we decided in Ooty at the Gurukulum to stop using any artificial fertilizer, and we started growing organic.  So, that was the beginning of the organic movement, when Vanya started the Earthtrust, she leased a piece of land a few miles outside of Ooty Town.  So the organic movement is farily recent, after the excesses of this Indo-German project.  They were really starting to destroy the topsoil, and the organic movement really took hold.  Even some tea estates, like Korakundah, have turned organic.  Our neighboring tea estate has also turned organic.  Vanya formed a trust with membership of many small farmers who were interested in organic farming, and they would have meetings and decide who planted what.  It’s really well organized, they have regular meetings, they help each other out, and they make a planting calendar for the entire year.  All their produce is immediately brought to their center in Ooty and is distributed to locals and to people in other cities.  So commercially, it’s quite successful.  Our farming practice is not commercial at all, it’s only for our own use.  So, it’s on a much smaller scale.  We do potatoes, cabbages, beans, peas, in small plots, using no artificial fertilizer.  We might use some cow manure and sub irrigation with rainfed, and artificial, with the hose, but absolutely no form of artificial fertilizers.  The results are very good.  With the Earthtrust, of course it’s very well organized, it’s running on some proper principles, and they are networked with other organic movements, so that’s quite a well-coordinated movement.

AB: When the Gurukula switched over to organic, is that when you decided not to sell commercially anymore?

VP: Yeah, once we went organic, the scale was highly reduced.  Though we have sold at times, small batches.  We sold a small load of pepino, a type of fruit from the South Americas.  We had a lot of pepinos, so we took a bagful, we had a number of kilos.  So it’s not a matter of principle, it’s just that we don’t have enough quantity to sell organic.  But we have the outlet, because Earthtrust will sell anything we grow.

AB: Has it been a loss financially for the Gurukula to no longer sell potatoes?

VP: Not really, because we are not investing that much in it in any case, so it’s not a question of loss.  This now goes with the other plan we had to grow the local trees.  That land that was originally used for potato cultivation is now under the native trees.  So, we decided to increase the amount of native trees and reduce the amount of farming land.  Then, I went for this conference in Bangalore, where somebody was talking about, it’s ok to plant under the tree, and you did not have to cut down all the trees to do farming.  So, we’ve now started growing vegetables under the trees, and that’s working quite well.

AB: You have an agroforestry system.

VP: Most of the old farmland is under these native trees now, farming now is treated for our own consumption, though we did have it running commercially for many many years, and running purely on the rain, without any artificial irrigation, and it was successful, we got enough income to run the ashram just from the farm.  But times have changed, and we don’t do that anymore.  Small plots, beds for our own consumption and workout and exercise and that kind of thing.

But the trees project really came about for the same reason.  You know, these were all grasslands at one time, the Upper Plateau of the Nilgiris was generally grassland, you would have seen this when we went to Avalanche.

AB: Where we saw the fox?

VP: Yes, exactly.  Now, again with this policy of the British, with their need for woodpulp for rayon and other industries, they put a lot of eucalyptus and acacia for the tanning.  They planted huge tracts of eucalyptus trees.  In those days, all of us were planting eucalyptus trees.  My father, who was the head of the school, had several hundred acres of land under eucalyptus trees, which he organized as part of a drive to reforest.  We also put in a lot of eucalyptus.  Now, with more understanding, we realize eucalyptus is not good for the environment here, so one thing we wanted to do on a long term basis was replace all of the eucalyptus with native species.  Fortunately for us, the Forest Department was also thinking the same thing, and they had a nursery where they had saplings of native trees and species.  And they were very generous with their saplings, so we got many of our saplings through the Forest Department nurseries, and through other friends who were involved with reforesting.  The eucalyptus trees grow very fast, but these native trees grow so slowly, so it’s taken almost 9 years for them to grow 10 feet.  In our lifetime, I don’t think we’re going to see more than 15, 5, 10, 15 feet maybe of a tree.  This is a long term thought.

AB: How did you decide which species to plant?

VP: So, we didn’t have much of a choice.  Whatever was available.  It’s not representative of all of the species, only four or five species are there, which we are repeating.  So in that sense, it’s not truly as diverse as a forest.  But I’m hoping that once these germinate and create an environment with seeds and birds coming, they will start regenerating, and other species will come in slowly.  So we’ve put in the hardy, more easily available saplings.  And once they become a little canopy, I guess we’ll have other species growing.  That’s the whole idea, to make it a naturally growing forest.  The effect is quite amazing, lots of birds have started coming now.  Hares are there.  I’ve seen partridges.  So many species of birds, and even the gaur, what do you call, the bison, a kind of big buffalo like beast, they have also started coming there.  So it seems to be creating some kind of environment which is attracting animals.  It’s definitely a good move.  And they look very nice, as they’re growing, they have a character and look very nice, so I’m very happy with that.  And there are some fruit trees as well.  A couple of pear trees, a couple of lemons.  The pear tree is finally giving fruit, after many years.  So, organic farm, organic vegetables, and the trees are the main changes we’ve done.  The vegetables growing under the trees are working well, I think there is a difference in the roots, the veggie roots don’t go down quite so deep, so they co-exist quite happily.  And the trees provide some shade, also, and retain some moisture.  It’s a wonderful thing, really.  Last year, with the Northeast monsoons, there were huge landslides and a lot of cropland got washed off.  This year the rains have been bad, I just got an email that there’s been another small landslide.  So, it’s wrecking the insides, this farming practice, with the rains coming in, more buildings coming in.

AB: Have you done any management with the trees—have you done any thinning, or you just planted them where you planted them and let them grow.

VP: Yeah, so actually we didn’t follow the rule of lines, not planting them in lines, just seeing locations where they would look nice and planted them.  Some of them, I agree, don’t have enough place and should have been given a little more place to grow.  But otherwise, they were pretty much ad hoc, in a spontaneous way we just planted them.  Another thing is that we didn’t get the saplings all at once, we got them all at different times, so we’d get small batches.  Once we got 150 and planted them in more or less rows.  A lot of them perished, only a few have survived.  Then we got another batch, so I planted some which are just random.  So it’s been reforesting in stages.  The first batch is behind the kitchen building and is doing pretty well.  They are also not particularly planted in any kind of rows.  Management wise, we don’t do anything, just leave them alone.  They seem to be doing pretty well.  One of them got damaged in the monsoon wind last year.  So, one big branch came down.  Some of that wood is very soft, so we’ll have to trim some of the branches if they get too big.  That’s about it.  Otherwise just leave them alone and let them grow.

So tracing how it got there, it started with the Britishers and their kitchen gardens, and it’s picked up the tribes, not the local tribes, but these migrant people, who are farmers from Karnataka.  What we call the Karnatakas and the Badagas.  They speak a language which is closer to Kannada, rather than Tamil.  So I can image what was going on, they would plant these vegetables in the villages, bring them into the town, and sell them to the townspeople.  Now it’s run like an industry.  Even floriculture has come in, and mushrooms.  Floriculture is totally for export, they send the carnations and roses to the Middle East, maybe even further.  So you can see how people have kept changing and adapting, but really potato was one of the early, big crops.

AB: So the Badagas, they are a tribal people, just not originally from the area?

VP: Yeah, they’re not, their roots are in Karnataka.  There is a story that they are escaping the Muslim persecution, because Mysore was under Tipu Sultan, who was a Muslim ruler, so they migrated up to the Nilgiri Hills and settled down.  Whereas the Toda people always lived here, and were dairy people.  They had buffalos, and as there was grassland on the top, the buffalos could feed on the grass.  And then they would get milk and other products, which they traded with the other tribes living in the hills, like the Kotas, who made music and pottery.  It was a very nice, interdependent communities, living with mutual, symbiotic kind of relationships.  The Badagas who came in from Karnataka, actually, they own most of the land now.  The Todas have been squeezed out because their culture never had this kind of land ownership.  Whereas the Badagas, they own most of the land, and their whole culture is around farming, vegetable farming and tea estates.  And now you find them as doctors, lawyers, architects.  But their roots are in farming.  Now the question is, where did they get this farming practice.  Well, obviously they got it from the British.  Indians didn’t have potatoes and carrots.

AB: So they didn’t bring any farming methods or crops with them from Karnataka?

VP: Nothing would have survived in the hills.

AB: But were they agriculturalists in Karnataka?

VP: Probably they were.  That’s an interesting question, which I should look into, what were they doing before they came here.  They would have been growing their own types of crops, millets or something like that, gourds, eggplant, okra, things like that.  Once you cross that three, four thousand feet altitude, none of those things grow, so that’s when you shift to the English vegetables.  They’re famous for beans, and their diet includes various types of beans, they have a whole repertoire of beans.  That makes them similar to Pueblo Indians and other kinds of tribes that you have here, who have a lot of beans in their diet.

AB: So the tribal people from the Nilgiris foraged?

VP: Yeah, foraged, and forest products.  There was no farming, not in the Upper Plateau at least.  The Todas have no, they are absolutely clueless about farming.  In fact, one of the government projects was to make them into farmers, so they’ve started farming now under government encouragement and as a way to survive.  When you go to Toda settlements, you’ll see some small plots.  They were familiar with the forest and would have known all kinds of plants, edible plants and fruits, and they would have got grains and things from the tribes of lower altitudes, and they would have supplied them with milk and butter and things.  You can see the vertical interdependence there, this back and forth movement.

AB: Have there been any efforts recently to allow more free movement of the buffalo, or is it just impossible because of settlement and private land?

VP: Oh no, they still have their herds, but the poor things now hardly have any place to eat, because all that area is covered with eucalyptus trees.  The buffalos look all emaciated, not very healthy.  Their traditional lands have been taken out with this reforestation and also by building of dams, hydroelectric power plants.  When they started damming the rivers, that actually submerged a lot of their traditional pasture land and also their traditional migration routes.  They really got a raw deal out of the so-called development of Ooty.  Everyone has benefited except them.  They’ve been squeezed into these settlements now.  But of course they still have relative freedom, you can see them in the town walking around.  They don’t have any of that old glory they had, to wander freely over the land and take their buffalos and live in their hamlets.  Now they live in small settlements, and still have their buffalo and do some farming.  So, they have adapted, and many have converted to Christianity and got educated and got jobs and work in a bank.  So that’s the story of those guys.

But among the revivalists, Dr. Selvaraj is there, and he’s done a lot through the Horticulture Department, and his own personal commitment.  He’s passionate about this revival and the environment.  He organized a very big conference once, two days, an organic farming conference in Ooty where they had people from as far away as New Zealand.  There were workshop, and a demonstration at Vanya’s nursery.  They also have a nursery up near Dodabetta.  Did you go there?

AB: I did, they had bused in some farmers that day to teach them organic techniques.

VP: There is a lot of awareness now, there’s also the Keystone people.  There is definitely a market for organic products, people are aware of it and willing to purchase it whenever it’s available.  Supplies are still not adequate, but the demand is there.  Tea has already gone organic.  Now there is more than one variety of organic tea available.  Through Keystone, we have various types of spices which are organic, coffee which is organic.  And then they are interconnected with other movements, and now you get rice and wheat and things which don’t grow in Ooty through their network.  It’s becoming quite well-established.  And if you go to the big cities, places like Fabindia, they sell it there.  It’s very much alive and it’s there, but of course mainstream is so commercially driven, there’s just no hope of tackling it.  They farm three times a year, giving the land no rest, just taking out as much as you can using artificial fertilizers and sprinkler systems.  It’s almost like a factory.  You should give the soil some rest.

AB: I remember that Dr. Selvaraj was really focused on bringing cows back into the picture.

VP: Oh yeah, the cow story is very interesting because of this mixture with Holsteins.  Now, we take the native cattle, our friends in Baikara who have another Gurukulum there and have cows, they keep saying how difficult it is to keep the cows alive, they had cows but the cows all die.  We also had many calves dying when we had cows at the Gurukulum.  Part of the reason is the kind of cross-breeding they’ve done to produce these cows.  They cross bred the local cows with the Jersey Holstein.  This is again part of that Indo-German project in the 80s, when they brought in European breeds and then created these Holsteins, which were supposed to give huge amounts of milks, unimaginable yield compared to the pure native cow, which would hardly give a liter or two, and these things would give 10, 15 liters a day.  But the calf mortality rate is very high.  The native cows, they survive much better.  I think there is some interest now in wanting to go back to the native species.  And in some places they have wiped them out. 

So, these policies, they have ideas and they think it’s good, and they implement them, and after 10 years you see the backlash and problems.  It’s about learning lessons.  I think the organic movement is the first time we’re seeing something sensible finally coming out of the farming community, and also the with reforesting with the native species, for the first time we’re seeing something sensible coming out from the forestry system.  All these things were put in place by the British, and their main thrust was economics, they were not interested in anything else, they were not thinking of the environmental fallout or the problems they would create.  So some good projects are taking place to reverse that trend.  We in the Gurukula in our own small way are making our own contribution towards that, by saying enough is enough.

Everyone is nursing some kind of anxiety or fear, some angst, and then you bring in technology, which brings in more distance between people, in the name of more efficiency.  The hunter-gatherer society definitely had a more integrated quality.  So the Gurukulum is trying to reverse these trends, so even in terms of living the simple life close to nature, and in harmony with your fellow human beings.  We reverse the social, economic, political fragmentation that’s happening.  Organic farming and reforestation is taken in that context of bringing greater integrity and harmony and peace amongst all of us.  That’s also part of the project.

AB: I was wanting to ask how the philosophy of the Gurukula informs your decisions about farming and reforestation, I don’t know if you want to add anything to what you just said.

VP: Yeah, that’s the whole idea.  The point of it all is to make our lives more harmonious and better.  And I can really say it does.