The powerful insights hidden in ‘Prakritik Kheti’..
Of the many potent ideas on sustainable farming practices that I am learning about, Natural Farming, ‘Prakritik Kheti’ is probably the most relevant in today’s context. The key principles date back more than 5000 years ago, and the insights are linked deeply to a wholistic understanding of food, nutrition and the soil.
Conventional farming as we know it today was a response to an era of famine. The world had been ravaged by the annihilistic intent of the colonial powers. It was further destroyed by the two World Wars that depleted the wealth of the west, and there was a lack of jobs and deep food insecurity across the newly formed post-colonial countries. The human response to this was the Green Revolution, a period when agriculture was converted into an industrial system by the adoption of modern tools of farming like tractors, irrigation technology, pesticides, fertilizer and seed technology like the use of high yielding variety seeds. One can say that this was an age of incredible innovation in the Agri sector and the green revolution quickly spread across the world, reaching India in the 1960s.
Here in India, the land of the Indus valley civilisation, agriculture, even uptill the 1960s, was a practice that philosophically connected the people, the soil and nature, in an economically productive, nutritionally balanced method of progress.
In a recent lecture at the Bangalore International center, Dr. Prabhakar Rao, Trustee of the Sri Sri Institute of Agriculture Sciences and Technology Trust, and a keeper of heirloom native seeds, shared some of the brilliant insights that lay hidden inside the traditional form of ‘Prakritik Kheti’ (natural farming) that was practiced across the sub-continent, for several millennia before the Green Revolution came in.
His insights are best described by illustrating the different paradigms of these methods. I will make an attempt to highlight these nuances through this post.
Conventional farming, a product of the green revolution, assesses soil health as the ‘availability’ of certain minerals, micro nutrients and organic carbon. If you see any soil health card, you will see this list of ‘available’ nutrients. Thus indicating that there are nutrients that may also be ‘unavailable’, but also assuming that it can only access these available nutrients in very small, microscopic quantities. Therefore there is a need to significantly augment these nutrients in the soil, for cultivation. Since a plant needs a lot more to achieve full potential than the soil makes ‘available, this methodology treats the soil as just a medium, and adds all ‘unavailable’ elements externally, to ensure the crop is able to grow to its full potential. This is a paradigm drawn from the need to produce large quantities of food, quickly, for a growing population. It essentially translates the need for food security into an industrial assessment of soil which is treated barely as a resource that needs to be coerced to increase crop yield, reduce defects in crops and be re-used extensively.
The industrialisation of agriculture in this manner triggered immense innovation in developing fertilizers, pesticides, hybrid seeds, disease management and, as we now know fairly well, not all of that innovation was necessary, or even healthy for the world. Today industrial agriculture is considered one of the main culprits of climate change!
So what’s the alternative?
In general terms these days, ‘organic farming’ is often popularly assumed to be the solution to such destructive, conventional, chemical-based farming methods.
To my surprise, Dr. Prabhakar Rao highlighted how wrong this notion might be. He contends that the popular knowledge of organic farming is born out of the same paradigm, where soil is considered a resource, with a certain quantity of ‘available’ nutrients, which need to be enhanced in a more environmentally sustainable manner. So chemical fertilisers are replaced with layers of vermicompost, cocopeat, large quantities of farm yard manure (FYM) are added, and pesticides are created from organic sources like sea weed, neem and pongamia, amongst other ingredients. This ends up being as economically unviable as conventional farming. For example it increases the number of cattle needed per acre since FYM is a main ingredient of the methodology, which further increases the need for grasslands, for instance. Dr. Rao contends that compost, cocopeat and FYM is great, but it only adds to better soil structure, and does not really unlock the intrinsic nutrition within the soil. These methods end up making agriculture even more complex for small farmers to adapt to the organic approach. Costs stay high, both for farmer and consumer, and food nutrition continues to be ignored.
Prakritik Kheti or natural farming on the other hand operates on a very different understanding of soil, suggests Dr. Rao. It is a set of practices that recogniszes the intrinsic vitality, or ‘Satva’ of the soil, and seeks to protect and nurture it.
The ancient farmers applied traditional ecological knowledge that revered the Soil as the giver of life, an integral part of the ecosystem that needed to be nurtured. In this context, the understanding is that nature converts available nutrients into minerals so as to protect them from flowing away into the ocean, and stores them in the soil. And when needed, it uses microbes to breakdown minerals and make the nutrients available to the plants in the quantity as needed. Ancient farming techniques considered soil as a rich source of these nutrients, which it keeps locked up in complex minerals and makes it ‘unavailable’ so as to protect the nutrients from being washed away in rain or floods. And in this way the Earth behaves like a large storage factory, storing away critical nutrition and protecting it. The only way to access these hidden nutrients is to introduce unique microbes that work inside the soil, unlocking the complex mineral molecules, so that plants can absorb that nutrition easily, and in return are gifted sugar molecules by soil, for their effort. This results in a progressive cycle, the microbes proliferate further, and thus unlock more nutrients for the plants.
Amazingly, these unique microbes that have the key to unlock the soil’s nutrients are all living in the gut of a Bovine animal! Fresh dung, fresh cow urine are rich sources of natural microbes that could unlock the nutrients in soil and make them available. Not dried or cured FYM, but fresh dung and urine, which is considered one of the best organic solvents known to mankind. This intrinsic, symbiotic relationship between soil nutrients and the cow was the core of the ancient understanding of farming and Dr. Rao suggests that we see this ancient reference in the seal of the Indus Valley Cilization, represented by the Brahman Bull.
This understanding of the science of the soil and interrelated microbes is the essence behind Natural Farming and has been translated into Jeevamrutha, and other similar natural, nutritional fertilisers made using the fresh microbes from the Cow’s gut, amplifying them with sugar and protein (Jaggery/ Gram Flour). Natural farming techniques are therefore based on introducing these microbes into the soil, letting them work under a layer of mulch, hidden away from the sun’s rays, within a humid microclimate created between the soil and mulch.
For a moment, visualise this beautiful, natural, symbiotic relationship of Prakriti. The soil protects its valuable nutrients from being washed away, hides them in complex mineral molecules that are unavailable to plants. Then keeps the keys inside the Bovine gut. As cows graze in forest cover, their fresh urine and dung carry the microbes that unlock the molecules into the soil, nutrients are unlocked, this also attracts earthworms, which help to decompose dead leaves and other material, thus building more soil. And in this process, soil has made ‘available’ all the nutrition that any crop or plant needs in order to reach its full potential, without any need for external amplification.
In essence, the core difference is that conventional farming views the soil just as a medium with limited available nutrients which need to be externally augmented and forcibly coerced for cultivation. Natural farming, on the other hand, views soil as the source of all nutrition necessary for life, it is the science of understanding how to access the unavailable nutrients with microbes that can unlock them within the soil, for the purpose of growing food, in the right conditions.
So what are these right conditions for optimum natural farming? Is it economical? Does it balance food security, human nutrition and environment? More on that in another post! But suffice for now to say that large scale mono culture could very soon be passé . There is an increasing recognition of the need to move away from long, endless rows of moco-crops and to learn how messy forest cover, intense multi-cropping, crops growing with each other in a beautiful, noisy cacophony of symbiotic relationships could be more productive!
Two books that I suggest reading if any of the points above intrigue you enough:
- The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben
- The One Straw revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka
(Please note that I have drawn heavily from Dr. Prabhakar Rao’s lecture last week, but also included insights that I may have gathered from my own farm experiments and in reading a bunch of other books over the last couple of years on farming techniques...)
In the next few posts, more on natural farming, and how new urban farmers could adopt those principles into their farms, in financially viable ways. And I also think there is now increasingly a case to discuss why the world needs to develop frameworks for ‘sustainable innovation’, not just innovation at any cost.
