this is my last day at auroville. am leaving tomorrow for mombai (british called it bombay). going from almost the southwest tip of india (pundacherry) to near the last place still touching the sea in the northwest of india. will see if i can get a train, (there is a 5% limit on tourists on trains so often we must schedule way ahead) but might fly because of my back, also not sure if i am up for another 48 hour train ride just now. they do have a disabilities car and if i can get on that, will go for it.
this week has been amazing. my back is slowing improving allowing me to visit a lot of the farms and more than visit have the energy to take it all in.
solitude farm. solitude is 6 acres of land seems like 5 acres food production, the rest is in a guest house, some huts tamil style, which is often bamboo with coconut leaves for a roof which keeps out the water. he also some land dedicated to music festivals. he has a farm combing a lot of his interests, music and natural farming.
krisna has recently opened an organic restaurant to show folks living in and visiting auroville about local foods. he also has a csa for aurovillians to learn about food production. he has what seemed to me to be a lot of 15 year old banana trees and is growing a lot of rice, other grains and vegetables in amongst them. he has a well which was powered until this year with his windmill and solar, but this year added electricity so as not to miss the critical time for watering the rice during the flowering stage.
krisna represents the local farm serving the local community, he is maximally using everything he loves including his music. i asked him if any of the indians have taken an interest in his farm ad he said his main assistant is developing his own sense of what is needed and getting good at it. my own predilection for of course is a demonstration farm would work more with the indians to start having their own farms. especially true in auroville, where after 45 years there seems to be plenty of water and a lot of land lying fallow. i was delighted to hear krisna talking about some of his students growing potatoes at a time when he had tried to grow potatoes and because it was too hot, they had not succeeded when he grew them. she had planted them under the banana trees and they did well even though it was too hot out in the open., i loved it that he was learning from the folks that worked with him.
i got a new insight about natural farming from this farm. in permaculture (or maybe i should say in my vision of permaculture) we are looking to have an established all perennial growth like an end stage forest system.
in natural farming they are looking to grow crops in a way that can be repeated for centuries, if water is not easily available then without additional water, growing the grains and vegetables that they eat. so while they are still doing no till they are planting every year and here where it is fairly tropical, they can plant everything under trees. i have heard for years that this is not possible in the u.s. i say that is poppycock. we just cannot take the rotations they use and the seed varieties they use without refining the system to work for us. certainly we do not have the light they have here. i believe it is just like a food forest, it would take 1000 years to do it by the scientific, trial and error or isolating method. by using intuition, listening to the plant we could figure it out in 3-5 years.
