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Short Sunday morning weather musings

It’s raining again; just listening to that old song of Supertramp…

And that is what it has been doing a lot in July. We got a whopping 19cm of rain so far spread over 9 days which is quite different from last year where we got less than 5 cm over the same period.

At that time we were praying for rain to be able to establish a green manure crop in the rice fields. This year we are struggling to get the land prepared in the moments the soil is dry enough to be cultivated.

Weather and agriculture are the perfect means to learn patience, detachment and surrender. I used to have sleepless nights because the weather was playing truant and would stop the field work at crucial moments, destroy the crop at harvest time, complicate and halt construction work and much more. I surely learned a lot there and am much more accepting what comes and goes with that nowadays.

This reminds me of a movie where a guy is being accused of treason and is in jail and pretty relaxed with that. His lawyer asks him why he is not worried because he might get the death penalty for this. Then the accused asks the lawyer: ”Do you think it will help me if I would worry?”  

Right now we’ve gotten most of the green manure sown in the paddy fields and hope to finish it next week. The road repair which we started got stopped because to drive tipper lorries with material into the farm the soil needs to be dry not to get stuck.

The Gliricidea nursery has been planted and seeds start to sprout nicely in this cool and rainy weather.

Nursery.

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This week we started to work on our Gliricidea nursery. This is a yearly ritual where we prepare a nursery of 5000 or more Gliricidea seedlings to plant on the lands which are not easy to control.

Ambika and Sengani filling nursery packets with soil. Young Gliricidea widely planted.
Mature Gliricidea row planted.

Once grown, (by September/October), the seedlings are planted in straight rows in the field so we can mechanize the work of cutting and shredding. Most of the plantations are used to prepare shredded material to add to the compost. Annapurna still buys every year many loads of compost in the bioregion, and we want to bring that amount down over time by creating more biomass. Some of the shredded material is used for mulching our guava orchard.

Gliricidea Sepium is a medium-size leguminous tree which can be cut back periodically and will grow back thereafter. The leaves are rich in nitrogen (protein) and good for fodder and enriching soil/compost. It grows extremely fast when conditions are good.

The farm has planted 15-20 acres over the years. Some plantations are wide spaced and we can plant crops in between; some fields are more narrow and can only be used for creating organic matter.

Gliricidea is an important plant in our farming system and we give it due attention. Organic matter management is a very important part of an organic farm system.

Generally deer, stray cows/goats are not fond of it and pigs are only a real problem in the first year after planting when they uproot young seedlings. In this way Annapurna can still make productive use of parts of the farm which otherwise are ruled by wild life and stray animals.

Cow herd.

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Today the cow herd is grazing lazily in one of the paddy fields which has green manure plants growing in it. Our 20 acres of paddy land is divided in over 100 plots which are bunded and leveled individually. We have around 40 fields with lush green manure growing in it right now. The rest of the fields are all composted, plowed and waiting for a good summer rain to be re-plowed and sown with green manure seeds.

We had a very long, drawn-out monsoon this year ending only mid January; that is a month longer than usual. On top of that we had a very good rain in the 3rd week of February. We also had some light showers in May and June.

Because of this we could establish a leguminous green manure crop on over 7 acres of the rice land.
We are reaping the benefits right now because the herd of cows have a wonderful area to graze on.
Our rice plots are around 500-700m2 and the animals graze for approx. 1 hour per day in a plot to fill themselves with rich fodder. Since they graze a short time only parts of the plants will be eaten and the crop will recover after a good rain. Like this the cows have rich fodder and we have a nice green manure in September/October which will be plowed in to feed the next rice crop.
We use a mix of Pillipisaru (Phaseolus triloba) and Sesbania speciosa for this purpose. These two kinds do well in our heavy black clay soil and the animals graze mainly on the former and leave most of the Sesbania plants.

Annapurna Support Fund.

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This week blog, I want to share a reaction from one of our supporters about the “Annapurna Support Fund”. Toine is a Senior Aurovilian involved on governing level and working with Auroville Consulting.

Dear Annapurna Team,

Congrats with the Annapurna website. Finally, a site that you (hopefully) need not have to fence!
I read the following about the Annapurna Support Fund:

“The Annapurna Support Fund is a fund where the interest accrued from the fund will go to meet certain initiatives of Annapurna that are deemed as being necessary for the community or vital for farm development. Our target is to raise at least Rs. 30 lakhs, which will then be invested by the Financial Service in a secure interest-earning bond. Rs. 30 lakhs can earn an interest of about Rs. 20,000/month, which will be allocated towards specified farm expenditure. Only actual expenses of the farm as deemed necessary by the managers of the Support Fund will be met.
One example, actually an immediate need is fencing of the entire farm area to protect it from the fast-increasing wild pigs and deer. A pucca fence will also stop stray cattle damaging crops and encroachment of the land”.

Instead of investing the INR 30 lakhs (or more) in a financial instrument (deposit, bond) what would happen if this money is invested directly in Annapurna Farm?
The “return” would then be: (a) an environmental / social impact return (since organic food replaces non-organic food from the market); (b) a long-term financial return which would be the difference between the net present value of the cost of future market purchases and the cost of producing food at the farm.
If the return on the financial instrument is INR 2.40 lakhs per annum as stated above (INR 20,000 per month), the annual return would be 8% (which seems high when compared with present (2021) bond rates). If we can get a similar long-term return from the direct investment,  we create an inflation-compensation mechanism as well.

I understand that some institutions have no option but to park their surpluses in financial instruments since they have no activity of their own to invest in. But in the case of Auroville we can invest in farming assets and renewable energy assets to produce outputs that Auroville would otherwise buy from the market / TNEB.
Investment in an interest-earning bond may be “secure” but in the long term these instruments do not even beat inflation, leaving a net-negative return while the money is used by the bond issuer to fund outside projects rather this money going to Auroville’s own growth towards a self-supporting township.

If (a part of) the Support Fund comprises (interest-free) loans, which need to be repaid, such repayments can be financed from the farm produce or from donations / grants if they come about. But you get started with investing in the farm immediately rather than doing this at a slow pace with the interest income.

Please share your thoughts on this.
Best regards,
 Toine

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Dear Toine

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.
I fully sympathize with the idea that this way of investing is not really how we should deal with money.
At the time of creating the fund we were aware of this as well.

Still there were compelling reasons to go ahead.
Firstly, a good part of the corpus is money parked by individuals who need it back at often rather short notice.
After investing the money in one way or the other in the farm it might not be available very fast.
Annapurna is not a common input-output farm; economics are not on top of our agenda. For us other factors like ecology, quality, aesthetics are very important.
All over the world farming has been developed with economic returns as their main objective and in the process agriculture has become one of the most destructive forces on the planet.
In this respect it is interesting to look at what is happening to Dutch agriculture right now. At last they have realized that there is more to agriculture than monetary profit. Now i am very curious how they are going to redirect this sector.

Putting money into water harvesting, caring for old animals, planting trees where crops could grow etc is not directly giving us economic returns but we are convinced that these values resonate very much with our reason to be here, and in the long run will pay of.
This does not mean we are not looking at economics. I am very much keeping that in the picture. It is one way of measuring what happens on the ground and keeps us grounded in the world. We just do not make it our main decision making criterion whenever possible.
Our vision of Annapurna is to produce healthy and sustainable food for the community. We try to do this in an efficient and positive way.
Generally food is reduced to an economical commodity. We think that’s not the kind of food we want to produce in Auroville.

Coming back to the corpus, we are aware that the interest which is generated is probably not done in a very ethical way and so we are not totally happy with that aspect of it.
Better would be that the money would be invested into a finance generating Auroville unit and invest profit back into farms maybe.
What was important at the time of creation of the fund was the fact that we needed an assured small capital income every year to make the most needed improvements in the farm.
Having a regular income for investments is very important. Donations and grants are wonderful but their irregularity makes them less effective while planning development of the farm.
We also hoped the dynamic of investments  would set more inflow of donations in motion which has surely been happening since then.
As you will read in our upcoming newsletter you will see quite an array of projects in the pipeline right now financed by individuals, like yourself,  who have confidence and are inspired in what is happening on the ground.

Personally i am in favor of going slow and step by step.
It is hard to oversee the consequences of big projects and often lots of resources are wasted.
I have seen that once things are grounded and properly worked out the funds seem to materialize wonderfully.
This is really the magic of being in Auroville and being in that flow is important to me as an individual.
For me the how we go there is more important than arriving fast; I have seen if the how is done in the right way, the results will surely come.
Probably this writing did not satisfy you fully, but maybe gives you a bit of a inside how we look at this.
Thanks for being involved,
tomas

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Dear Tomas,

Thank you for your detailed response.

I agree with you that food (like almost everything else) has been reduced to a commodity that is controlled by the forces of money and short-term gains. At the same time, money is needed to invest in farms (land, equipment, irrigation systems etc.), renewable energy systems, water (recycling) systems etc.

There are a good number of investors out there already who look at social impact return instead of (only) financial return. Often these investors are fine with a low (and even uncertain) financial return as long as there is tangible social impact. We need to go in that direction in Auroville as well. In fact, Auroville must be one of the leaders in this new economy.

Auroville has substantial financial reserves. Definitely a part of these reserves can be invested as social impact funding in sustainable agriculture (as well as energy and water). The point that I am making is that investing in the old economy and using the returns of those investments into the new economy is one way of doing it. But a more effective approach would be to put a part of the available funds / reserves directly into the new economy.

Even with investments that are primarily social impact-driven, there will be financial returns, since eventually there will be food production (in this example) with a certain monetary value for which there are already existing recurring expenditure budgets. While with agriculture the “lead time” to production may be long, in the case of renewable energy it is immediate (replacement of TNEB power, for which there is already a recurring expenditure budget, with self-generated renewable energy).

The last time we spoke you mentioned of the need of fencing with a budgetary cost of about INR 50 lakh. Even if you want to move step-by-step, getting this fencing done would be one such step!

Finally, there is the aspect of “opportunity cost”. An old-economy concept, but to be considered even more in the new economy. If there is about 100 acres of land that can be cultivated but is not cultivated mainly due a lack of fencing, equipment, irrigation systems and people, that is a very high opportunity cost!

Best regards, Toine

Various projects.

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Digging of the pond, rice cultivation experiment and new biogas tank.

Besides the normal farm operations, we have been engaged with various projects in the past week.

Tarun is busy putting a periphery bund around a piece of forest land Annapurna acquired through a land exchange many years back. The land is a bit over one acre and is located in the very far North corner of the farm. We are digging a small water catchment pilot and with the soil which comes from the hole we are building a bund around the land.
We can do this work because of a generous well-wisher who sees the importance of protecting and greening the land.

Then we stumbled upon an interesting way of rice cultivation on the Internet which is practiced in northern Thailand. Madhuri is doing experiments in pots to test the viability of the system so we have a better idea how to implement it when the paddy season starts. We hope this method will help us make steps forward in using less labor in the paddy cultivation. Labor is by far the primary cost in rice cultivation and prices keep going up fast while labor availability is dwindling.

Another ongoing project which moved forward was the installation of an additional biogas tank. A few months back we got a second-hand biogas digester from Ravena (a greenbelt community in Auroville). Andre and his team have been busy fixing and repainting it. Yesterday we put it in the ground and in the next weeks we hope to get it all fixed and connected to the dairy and fruit processing facility. They’re all small steps but very important and it’s satisfying to see things coming to fruition after often very long preparations.

Starting the blog

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Hi there,

A weekly blog to give you a glimpse of our reality at Annapurna farm.

It will sometimes be a bit more elaborate and philosophical, at times short, practical, and to the point.

Right now we are developing more land for green fodder cultivation for the dairy. Our aim is to slowly reduce the concentrate feed which we purchase and replace it with our own-grown nutritional greens.

Since the plot of 1.25 acre had many roots from the previous tree crop it needed a more powerful tractor to rip plow and open it up. We do not have such heavy tools so we got a contractor to do it.

Next, we will put on farm yard manure (fym) which will be plowed in after the next rain.

After this we will install an irrigation system, fence the land with an electrical fence against deer and pigs,  and prepare for the fodder crops.

At this point in time Annapurna’s dairy has several cows which are retired and two of them, Welli and Malli, are really getting old and can not  keep up with the herd anymore.

These cows were born here and served us their entire lives; we feel it will not be good to sell them to a butcher, which is a common practice.

We have been looking at the different sides of this reality and will continue to do so.

The discussion veers between economic repercussions, emotional attachment, practical reality, animal wellbeing, Indian cultural values and more. It’s not an easy deliberation, and we want to share it with you, in this small note, to give people who do support us in various ways, another understanding of the complexity of farming with our dilemmas, restrictions and possibilities.

In short, if we really want to eat food from happy and sustainable farms, which are managed more humane and are less economical oriented, this will have a serious impact on our lives. Can we, do we want to change our lives for this? What are we willing to do to cultivate such places?

Personally I think, looking at todays reality and taking into consideration public health and the earth’s ecological boundaries,  we actually have no choice.

On the ground we have been busy with the usual grain processing to fulfill the weekly incoming grain orders from Foodlink (Auroville’s farm distribution center) and individual communities, then we are bringing in fym to the rice fields for the new season to come, irrigating fodder and fruit crops, and cleaning up the nursery area for a new Gliricidea nursery and fence plants.