The Old Man and The Farm

Ernest Hemingway is one of my favourite authors whom I began reading in my early teens in school and by the time I reached the end of college I had read almost everything he had written both fiction and non-fiction. The first book of his that I read was, "The Old Man and The Sea", about an ageing Cuban sea fisherman, Santiago, who after a long spell of going without a catch finally kills a huge Marlin fish after much struggle. However, since he has gone deep into the ocean to catch the fish, he is unable to bring it back as sharks attack the fish strapped to the side of the boat and so even after many of them being killed by Santiago, eventually he returns with only the skeleton of the huge marlin that he has killed as the sharks polish off the meat. The novel immediately became both a popular and critical success and remains an inspiring story of the tenacity of the human spirit in the face of severe odds.

Inspired as I was by Santiago at that young age when I first read his story, I never imagined that one day I would be in a similar situation when I too became an old man!! This year I have officially become an old man having become sixty years old which is the age at which one becomes a senior citizen in India. While normally people retire from their jobs at this age to lead a peaceful life, in my case the exact opposite has happened as not only have I not retired from what I have been doing all these years as an activist but I have been forced to take up another profession of which I know next to nothing full time - FARMING. Primarily because the couple who were looking after our farm for the past three years decided to move on and so I had to step in to help my wife Subhadra with the farm work.

Farming is back breaking work, especially organic farming with a biodiverse crop as we practice on our farm where we grow close to thirty varieties of cereals, pulses, oilseeds and vegetables during the rainy season. Matters have been compounded by the fact that we are the only ones growing sorghum and millets of various kinds in our village. So all the birds converge on our farm and it is a big task shooing them away. When I had posted about this on Facebook a few weeks ago many people had suggested using mechanical and audio devices in automated scarecrows to drive the birds away. However, they will not succeed. Such is the hunger of the birds and their number, that they do not fly away till one gets absolutely close to them like in the picture below in which I have reached within three feet shouting at the top of my voice and yet it is calmly sipping the juice from the stem of the sorghum plant.

These birds are actually beneficial to farming as throughout the year they eat various kinds of worms. So when the harvest comes they are entitled to their share of it. If all farmers are doing biodiverse agriculture and growing sorghum and millets then the birds will get distributed over the whole village and so it won't be so much of a loss for one farmer. Thus, the solution to this problem is not some mechanical or electronic technological solution but the adoption of ecologically sustainable bio-diverse agriculture which will also ensure that we eat good healthy food instead of the chemically poisoned stuff that is now coming to our plates.

Anyway, I soldiered on running around and shouting at the birds and firing stones at them from a slingshot. Since it was not possible to shoo the birds away from the whole farm singlehandedly I finally fell back on covering the cobs of the sorghum with plastic bags but this required constant supervision. The maturing grains in the cob evapo-transpirate and so the plastic bags have to be opened up from time to time to let the condensed water dry out as otherwise the grains would rot. 

When I had got this system going satisfactorily and the birds were held at bay, another problem cropped up. This year it has been raining heavily in September when normally the monsoon withdraws in the first week. The heavy rains resulted in the grain on the cobs rotting despite all that I could do and eventually we could only get the millets in with some difficulty and the early variety of sorghum rotted completely making me understand very well the frame of mind that Santiago must have been in after losing his huge marlin kill. Towards the end I felt like the poor farmer Halku in Premchand's famous story "Poos Ki Raat", who eventually can't stand the bone chilling winter cold anymore and goes to sleep instead of chasing away the boar that come to gorge on his ripening harvest. In fact other farmers in our area are even more morose than we are. Due to our biodiverse agriculture we will succeed in getting more than half our crop in eventually but the other farmers who are cultivating monocultures of hybrid maize and soyabean have been laid completely low with virus attacks and rotting cobs and pods due to excessive rains.

This is the dark reality of chemical monoculture farming these days. It has destroyed farmers practising it and it is also affecting the viability of the few farmers who are trying to do sustainable agriculture. Unfortunately, there is not enough of a demand from farmer's organisations that the Government provide a substantial subsidy for switching from the destructive chemical to sustainable agriculture. Instead the demand is for providing greater subsidies, insurance support and support prices to shore up the ecologically and economically unsustainable chemical agriculture. There is understandable anger on the part of farmers against the abolition of the Mandis and the opening up of the agricultural markets to corporations because they fear that this will eventually lead to the end of the current regime of support prices and government procurement. The mandi system even at present is dominated by big corporations through their agents and prices of raw agricultural produce is determined in commodity exchanges through algorithmic trading and relayed to the mandis in real time through their agents. Except for the main procurement crops of rice and wheat there is little effective support for other crops where open market prices rule. It does not matter which way the price moves and how much as any movement leads to profits with the huge speculative investments that are made by the corporations in the online commodity exchanges. The new law just makes this control of the agricultural commodity markets by corporations open and reduces their costs. The same applies to the easing of the conditions of contract farming and the removal of many crops from the essential commodities list. These amendments just make legal what has been going on under hand for quite some time now. Thus, what these new laws have done is just legalise the surreptitious control of corporations on the agricultural sector further facilitating the operation of a totally irrational global food system tuned to the churning out of profits for the corporations involved in seed, fertiliser and pesticide production, agricultural commodity trading, food processing and retail sale while the interests of the farmers and consumers are totally sidelined. 

Like in the case of Santiago and Halku who are unable to fight the larger forces that obstruct them, the structural obstacles that stifle the farmers are too strong for them to be able to do much. I too looking back on three and a half decades of activism find myself in the same situation as I have not been able to achieve much in my fight for bringing about sustainable and equitable development and am now an old man pursuing farming as fruitlessly as Santiago did his sea fishing!!