Aanandaa Farms: How we converted degraded land into a beautiful food forest using permaculture

The thought of converting a barren piece of land into a green food forest was daunting. It was very challenging, but I didn't for a moment think that it cannot be done. If you work with nature, nature gives back by leaps and bounds. The trigger point came in 2010 when on a holiday we met a dear friend of mine, Preeti Singh, who told us about permaculture. She said that her husband and she were planning to buy a piece of land and pursue permaculture. We'd really never heard of this word before, but it sounded really fascinating because it was not really agriculture, but it was a way of creating an ecosystem where plants, animals, insects, birds, everybody lived together to create a highly productive environment where you could grow your own food with very minimal effort. And that's really what attracted us. It seemed like something that we could do, even though we lived in Bombay and had full-time jobs. I was born and brought up in a city and I was working in a bank for 15 years when we came up with this idea. So we treated it like an adventure, like an experiment. It was both scary and exciting at the same time. The entire act of first scouting for land, buying it, getting it fenced up, getting it marked out, which was a new experience for me. So just the fact that we could plant a small sapling of a tree two feet in height and today these have become trees which are 50 feet tall, was something which I could not really envision and I wasn't fully confident that it would happen. The land was a barren piece of land. It looked like a dirt track from the city or an empty plot of land that you will find in a place like Gurgaon or something like that. And because it's a corner plot and has a road on two sides of it, there was a diagonal dirt track running through it. So we had a lot of tractors and motorcyclists who used to go through it. It was a dusty, dry piece of land with about six or seven scraggly date palms. And that's really what we inherited. Our supervisor, who's grown up in this village, says that even when he was a young child and he went to school, this piece of land was always lying barren. We make everything from here. Well, so once we bought the land, we had to buy the land from quite a few farmers because we were looking for a packet that was at least about six acres in size. And so we had to buy it from five, six different people. That itself was a Herculean task, getting all of them to come on a particular day and do the registry at the tehsil. But once we got the packet of land, the first thing we did was we got a surveyor to come and survey the land and give us the topography and the exact shape of the land. Once we could see that on a piece of paper, it was much easier to visualize how we would design this place. If you look around our farm, I think everybody, each and every farm help also understands this, that naked soil will not be really tolerated on the farm. It's a bit like a wound on your skin. It's like if you don't have your skin and your flesh is exposed, is what naked soil looks like. So soil is always covered. Even when we plant crops or we plant vegetables or anything, we will always cover up the soil with some kind of a mulch. In fact, initially we didn't have any mulch on the property. So I had to buy truckloads of mulch from somewhere to mulch up all our trees that we'd planted. So we've applied the principles of zoning when we've built this farm. We've planted a windbreak on the periphery. So you will see two, three rows of casuarina and silver oak on the entire periphery of the farm. We've also put a green fence, which is of bougainvillea. Bougainvillea is very native to this area. And in fact, it's very common in Chandigarh, Panchkula and the neighboring area. So it was our natural choice for a hedge. We've then followed the principles of zoning. So we've got zone 1, which is where our house is and our vegetable garden is and the herbs are. They're all in the same zone 1. Zone 2 is where we've planted our fruits. Moving on to zone 3 is where we keep animals. So we have cows and hens. And from time to time, we've had other animals as well. Zone 4 is where we plant our crops. And initially, we didn't have that area. We added on two acres of land in 2014, which is where we started growing crops. And zone 5 is really our wildlife corridor. Initially, when we started, we'd kept a much smaller zone 1 and zone 2 and a much larger zone 5. Because, you know, that was the easiest thing to do. But over the years, we've started now entering into zone 5 and taking more area under cultivation or productive cultivation. We've started planting fruit trees in the middle of our forest. Because we believe now that the soil is ready for fruit trees. And that we have the time and the energy to actually look after them and tend to them. We've always had a lot of flood water and storm water runoff running through the farm. It was fairly destructive. It used to take a lot of topsoil and a lot of vegetation with it and pretty much disappear within 24 hours. So we've built a lot of water management systems through the farm. It starts off with the water entering our farm up north through a culvert, which flows from under the road. We've built channels which meander through the land, slow down the water. Channels are all lined by grasses and, you know, bamboos and date palms. Many of these things just grew by themselves. So they clean the water, they hold back the soil and the dirt and other things which come. The sediment is dropped way above, so none of it flows into the pool. And then this pond overflows and you can see goes past behind me to the village pond, which is fairly large as well. And once that fills up, then the water flows over the Gavion structure, which we've made as part of the restoration of the damaged weir and finally settles into the last pond, which is the retention pond for us. I think I estimate that when it rains heavily and all our ponds, pools, soak pits, when everything fills up, we are probably storing at least 50 to 60 lakh litres of water. Today, water flows through our land like a song. You know, it's like a lovely little brook. And definitely one of my favourite sights in the world is to watch the rainwater flowing through Ananda. Initially, we just, you know, we used to just keep looking at the trees. And if the trees grew taller, we used to feel happy that, you know, the farm is doing well. There was a time when we could actually sit at one end of the farm and see the other extreme of it because there was nothing. And then soon our vision started getting blocked. Some trees grew, they sort of, you know, came in the way. And that's really what started making us feel happy that, yeah, the trees are doing well. I think for us, that was a big motivator. But really the tipping point, and I'd read somewhere in, I think, some permaculture book, that one day a farm will really pop and everything will come together. And I think that happened maybe a couple of years ago, probably about four or five years into the farm being started. And that's when you start hearing the buzzing of the insects. You hear, you see a variety of birds. You can really throw some seeds somewhere and something will start growing. And your effort comes down dramatically and your productivity starts increasing. You are able to grow things which earlier you couldn't grow or wouldn't grow. A lot of things started coming together and started growing. And that's really when you feel that, yes, you're on the right track. And now this is, this has genuinely become an ecosystem where you don't have to do much effort. Some kind of a mulch. So that... Okay. Alright. Go. Bloopers.