Attended a 4 day workshop on Farming and #Permaculture Principles at Navadarshanam. I went with the expectation to learn a little about farming and came back with so much more with ties in perfectly with my own views and philosophies about several things in life. Some of the views that got reinforced included 1. Nature has a way of balancing itself. We only need to stop interfering with the process. 2. Just like with other things in life, we should strive to be catalysts in a process instead of proving life support. With kids we over parent. With plants we do the same by making them dependent on us for all their needs. 3. We have become extremely arrogant with our limited knowledge and use it to cause unlimited damage. Case in point our understanding of the impact of GM food. 4. To bring about any change, we need to tackle issues at a policy level. It is not enough to just do our bit though every bit counts. So support for organisations like Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA) and people like Vandana Shiva can help with Policy formulation. 5. Farming is not something that the children of the farmers want to pursue. This will only drive to more industrialisation of food which is bad for us on many many counts. 6. Eat Local. This cuts down all the cost involved in transport, storage in addition to making to healthier considering that the Food will not be modified to make it last longer to last during the transport. In addition it boosts the local economy. And of course there are several new things that I learnt. 1. There is no such thing as a weed. They all serve a purpose. So never uproot a weed. CHOP them at the base and DROP them. That way you never lose the nutrients stored within the weed. 2. Ploughing a field is bad for the soil. You end up losing a lot of good. The structure of the soil can be softened naturally to make it possible for one to sow without having to plough. Having enough earthworms for example will function like millions of micro bulldozers in your farm. 3. The Green Revolution was actually bad on many many counts. The biggest of them include (a) Creating crop strains that are input intensive (water, fertiliser and human attention) (b) Taking away much more from the earth and giving back very little. A combination of ignorance, bad policy and lost knowledge has now converted healthy farmlands into input intensive systems. Technically this like having children on Life Support system where they forget how to eat and digest food on their own. 4. When you eat in a restaurant, just about 10% goes to the person who actually grew the food. There are tons more and to be honest, the entire experience to me was almost spiritual. This is coming from an agnostic me :) I am now looking forward to visiting Navadarshanam again soon. And of course, met some wonderful people who I hope to keep in touch regularly to do something.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 04:33:09 +0000
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