The Harvest of Sunlight

Belakina Besaaya (The Harvest of Sunlight) is the name that TGS Avinaash, a businessman-turned agriculturist, has picked for a farming method that gathers together the wisdom of maverick natural farmers like Masanobu Fukuoka, Shripad Dabholkar, Narayana Reddy, Subhash Palekar, among others, and his own insights acquired over 15 years of farming experience. His father-in-law, Devanur Mahadeva, the great Kannada writer, who had admired Shripad Dabholkar’s views on the vital role of sunlight in agriculture, had used Belakina Besaaya as a title for a note he shared at a farmers’ meet over a decade ago. Published last year, Avinaash’s valuable book, Belakina Besaaya (Aharnishi Prakashana, 2022) shares the key features of the farming methods he has evolved through his experiments on a 2.15 acre farm outside Mysuru.

Written with steady self-conviction and earnestness, the 217-page long book is a patient uncovering of the many facets of the intricate process of farming. Its discussion of the agricultural value of sunlight reveals how different trees relate differently to it and how an attentiveness to its place can ensure that the land retains the soil moisture. The idea of digging narrow trenches along the sides of the farm that help recharge water as well as create humus which nourishes micro-organisms and keeps the farm soil healthful, which the author picked up from a civil engineer-turned-farmer, was utterly novel.

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Building on Palekar’s methods, Avinaash discusses the preparation of two kinds of fertilizers with natural ingredients, one that ensures the vitality of the farm soil at large (Jeeva Chaitanya) and the other that serves as plant manure (). The right means of pruning and weeding, the preparation of natural medicines for farm animals, the ways of building a ‘living fence’, the proper and effective ways of conserving and using water on the farm, all of these are described in simple, patient prose.

The discussion of (Food Forest), where a family of four can grow a variety of crops -- in less than half an acre -- that would help meet its annual household requirements of cooking oil, rice, pulses, sesame, jeera, vegetables, jaggery, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom and pepper was stunning as a reminder of the practical achievability of self-reliance.

Never polemical or anxious, Avinaash confidently tries to show that natural farming methods, which can be practiced across the range of agro-climatic zones, are high yielding, and discusses supplementary methods of increasing farm incomes. Naturally run farms, he argues, can become very profitable if the local economies were rebuilt with farmer-run institutions with enhanced scope for women and youth to participate in them.

Avinaash encourages visitors to drop in on his farm. He has initiated nearly 4,000 workshops and informal meetings with farmers across South India. During a conversation recently, he mentioned that his cell phone had stored the contacts of 17,000 farmers.

In his lecture titled City and Village, Rabindranath Tagore envisioned a future where both the countryside and the urban areas co-exist without mutual hostility. In this uncommon view of harmony between the two, unlike the boring modernising ideas that reduce the future to an all-urban affair, the Bangla poet saw cities as places where new knowledge is created and then shared with villages, which were in need of “health and knowledge.” Inspired by intellectuals from urban and rural backgrounds like Shripad Dabholkar and Subhash Palekar, Belakina Besaya, a book on natural farming by a former businessman shakes up Tagore’s binary discussion.

A text of ideas and practices generated on the farms, the book can enliven urban minds, too, by making them literate -- and respectful too, perhaps -- about a highly sophisticated life-sustaining process called farming. Likely to see an English edition soon, this book should have a therapeutic effect on economists and planners who view agriculture in purely market terms, as a sector with a diminishing share of the GDP and of the country’s workforce. The awakening to the rich knowledge and the social and ecological wisdom that make up the activity of farming and the very real possibilities of making rural livelihoods vibrant should inspire a different confidence among them.