CHENNAI: As residents of the city compulsively checked weather forecasts and crossed their fingers hoping that cyclone Fani will bring much-needed respite to Chennai, three friends rushed to their organic farm in Thennampattu village in Thiruvannamalai district on Saturday to expand their pond, refusing to pass up on an opportunity to have year-round-water for irrigation.
Quality matters
For three young fathers, Srinath Nagarajan, Jai Balaji and Swamynathan Sekar, what began as a quest for good milk following reports of sub-standard and harmful milk that surfaced in 2017, has become a full-blown 12-acre organic farming project.“We wanted to provide our children with good quality milk from native breed cows. Experts told us that cows need a proper grazing ground to produce good milk so we invested in land and we decided to produce organic crops in addition to having grazing ground for cattle,” said 40-year-old Jai Balaji, who runs an panel board business in Chennai.
Healthy obsession
Despite holding full-time IT jobs, former colleagues, Srinath and Swamynathan religiously visit the farm twice every week, and attend to routine farm chores barefoot. “This has become a healthy obsession for our families,” Swamynathan said, narrating how the project’s potential for greatness has fuelled their obsession productively over the last one year.
Walking the talk
“The locals were surprised when our borewell began spewing water and this piqued their curiosity about our project,” said Srinath, explaining how their decision to not use chemical fertilisers and pesticides also came under criticism from locals.Armed with training from a prominent organic farmer Meesai Mohanasundaram from Madurai, the trio have managed to produce 230 kg of groundnuts, 12 kg of black urad dal, 30 kg of long beans in less than a year. “We also get 20 kg of cluster beans and lady’s finger every week,” he said.This surprised the locals of Thennampattu and Pugaisamuthiram. “People have begun asking for our crop in the local market even though it is smaller from other chemically grown crops in the area,” said Sathya Thevendiran, who works on the farm.
Green future
Despite the attention that their project is getting from the villagers nearby and the panchayat bureaucracy, the trio concede that their project is in its nascent stages. “The families in our children’s school are receptive toward our crops but we don’t know where this project will take us,” said Swamynathan, as he monitored the kids running around the farm.“It’ll take time for villagers to change their practices by seeing this organic farm,” said P Theventhiran, the farm hand, explaining pesticides and fertilisers have become a part of farming.The trio have invested their life’s savings in their organic farming experiment. While they are unsure of how viable monetary returns will be, they claimed that they have already begun reaping non-quantifiable returns such as a healthy tan on their children’s’ faces, bruises from running around and a desire to live sustainable lives.