Farmers now spend up to 40 paise of every rupee they invest in crops on labour, which squeezes them badly since they have generally not been able to get higher prices for their produce. As a result, they are turning to weed-killers like glyphosate, the worlds top-selling herbicide. Nidhi writes: In India the glyphosate market is expanding 20% every year because farmers cant afford manual weeding any longer. Which is great for companies making weed-killers, but is ringing alarms in the minds of consumers like me.
To be fair, glyphosate seems to be fairly safe, losing toxicity rapidly and not lingering to cause cumulative damage as other such chemicals do. Nonetheless, concerns have been raised about its long-term effect on kidneys and reproductive health of people with high levels of exposure to it. More worrying is this reliance on chemicals in general once you are used to spraying chemicals to solve your problems, whats going to stop you using other chemicals which might not be as harmless. Studies have shown increasing concentrations of potentially toxic chemicals in the vegetables coming to our markets, and this new chemical dependence can only exacerbate that.
At this point any agricultural experts reading this are rolling their eyes because they know the O word is coming up. And I have to say I find it odd, even depressing, that no discussion seems to be happening on why this happy use of chemicals cant be offset by moving towards organic farming methods (like manual weeding) which are labour intensive, but get higher prices that can offset the costs.I know that the answer Ill get is that organic food is a fancy foreign fad that is fine for a few rich consumers but can never meet the real needs of the market. At most, it may work for the export market, because those foreigners will pay anything for fads, but it has no place in India.
This is the stock response on organic farming in India and most of it is debatable, but one part is dead wrong. Organic farming is not foreign to India at all. As the fact that manual weeding has been the norm till now indicates, a lot of Indian farming tended to the organic, if not formally and by intent, but just because farmers couldnt afford chemicals. Now, thanks to heavily subsidised agro-chemicals and factors like these rising labour costs, this is changing. The organic by default model now only applies to marginal crops that farmers wont waste chemicals on, like the apple trees in Kumaon that I wrote about recently, or the leafy vegetables (shaaks/bhajis/keezhais) traditionally grown by farmers wives.
Whats less known though is that the formal organic movement also has deep roots in India, and can even be considered to have been born here. Most histories of the organic movement credit the pioneering efforts of Sir Albert Howard, whose 1943 book, An Agricultural Testament is one of the founding texts. In it, Howard developed the idea of the soil as almost a living organism, in whose fertility lay the health of nations. The ideas he advanced in it, of the importance of humus, the organic matter in soil that is responsible for much of its fertility, and of the need to compost and spread waste material to renew humus, were popularised by admirers like Eve Balfour in UK who founded the Soil Association, the main UK organic organisation, and J I Rodale in the US, the founder of health-based magazines like Mens Health, who wrote that after reading Howard I was affected so profoundly that I could not rest until I purchased a farm. Michael Pollan, currently the leading American writer on the issue of food and the environment, describes it as an important work of philosophy as well as of agricultural science… a programme for not just agricultural but social renovation.
The key fact about Howards ideas is that they were developed in his 26 years as an agricultural scientist in India, during which he came to appreciate and develop the traditional farming practices of Indian peasants. An Agricultural Testament is, in fact, one of the most important books ever to have its genesis in India. It is hard to find in print, but can be freely downloaded from journeytoforever.org which also archives articles by Howard and a book on his work in India by his second wife, Louise. The books are well worth-reading, though not, it should be noted, easy reading, especially Louise Howards work, which is both reverential and dull. She was the younger sister of Howards first wife, Gabrielle, who was a scientist herself and partnered Howard in his early research into wheat in India. After she died, in 1930, Howard married Louise, who was clearly totally in awe of her sister and husband.
Howards own book is written in a clear style that makes for easier reading, if one skips all the detailed compost making instructions. What emerges is a fascinating picture of how Howard, while working within the imperial agricultural system, came to an extremely radical position for a British scientist in the Raj. Howard came from a farming family himself and was proud of it, often writing about his ability to handle livestock. This seems to have helped him overcome the usual racial prejudices and to be open to learning from local farmers, rather than dismissing them as illiterate peasants.
This was crucial to the breakthrough he arrived at when he was appointed, in 1905, as Imperial Economic Botanist to the Government of India to be based at the Pusa Agricultural Research Institute at Samastipur in whats now Bihar. (This institute, worth a story itself, was the Rajs premier agricultural research institute until it was devastated by the great Bihar Earthquake of 1934. The institute was shifted to Delhi to what is still known as the Pusa campus. The old university was rebuilt and is now the Rajendra Agricultural University). Howard admits that he benefited from the fact that the Pusa Institute was not entirely organised when he reached there, and that his own job description was not clear.
This was why, as he dutifully set to work researching wheat with his wife, and developing the economic crops needed by the Raj, like sugarcane and tobacco, he was also able to take note of what the farmers on the lands next to the Institute were doing. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods at the Institute their practices were traditional and primitive, and Howard made full note of their inefficiencies. Yet, he also noticed, to his surprise, that while their fields often had the pests that the scientifically tended Pusa fields did not, their plants themselves were healthier and so too were their cattle. During an outbreak of fiercely contagious foot-and-mouth disease on the campus, he noted the Pusa cattle rubbing noses with neighbouring oxen, yet these didnt get the disease.
Howard started to investigate this, running into resistance from the authorities who couldnt understand why he wanted to emulate the peasants that they were there to teach. On one occasion, he only got the oxen that he requested when they were directly sanctioned by the Member in charge of agriculture on the Viceroys Council. The oxen, he realised, were vital because, apart from helping work the land, they produced the manure for compost and, as important, the urine that helped catalyse the composting reaction. The key to this was bedding the cattle down with vegetable matter like hay or sawdust that got soaked with cattle urine and then, was cleaned out and mixed with the other waste matter, to start forming the vital compost. This was the core of what Howard would call the Indore process, which he developed after he left Pusa and moved to the Princely State of Indore, which was more receptive than the British authorities to his radical ideas. The Indore process is at the heart of organic farming principles, and next week Ill take up the story of how its development by Howard.