“Living in San Francisco made us loads extra aware of our surroundings. Being complete-time experts ourselves, we started out realizing how our way of life was fluctuating toward becoming dangerous due to our schedules,” says Vivek.
The couple’s first step in caring for their health was learning about cooking dinner together.
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“And yet, considered one of our largest struggles, we didn’t realize from which the meals we had been consuming every single day came,” shares Vivek.
The location the couple resided in turned into full of tall fruit-bearing bushes. It reminded Vivek of his formative years when life was less severe. Climbing timber barefoot, scraping your knees and arms, and the pleasure of plucking fruit off and then devouring them.
He desired to make that joy a part of his life again, and growing their own meals became how they thought they might savor it once more. The couple embarked on a journey to research permaculture standards in a state no longer far from California. This ride bolstered their solution to return to India and set up their farm.
“When we had been visiting for the path, we got here through a strawberry field. Just as we were taking part in the view, we saw a person dressed in a white shielding jumpsuit spraying liquid onto the plants. It sent a kickback down our spines. Imagine if the workers needed to put on a protective layer to save you the aspect-results of their spraying chemicals; we were ingesting the meals grown like that. It has not most effectively affected the consumers and the growers; however, the surroundings are also massive. This changed into our turning point.”
Interestingly, there was no opposition. Their families were supportive of their choice and beyond happy that the couple had decided to come home.
“We had no history in agriculture. However, our course helped us understand the diverse techniques we could employ to construct an herbal and sustainable farm. We decided to kickstart our journey by first growing what we preferred to consume. Being Gujjus, it had to be mangoes,” he laughs.
In 2017, an hour and a half away from Ahmedabad, they bought a ten-acre piece of land on the outskirts of Nadiad, Central Gujarat, to create a farm that would not only fulfill their kitchen wishes and make them unbiased of the market but additionally take in industrial operations.
That’s how Brindavan came about. From ensuring soil fertility with strategies including green manuring and controlled grazing to harvesting rainwater via pits and ditches, the duo exercises strategies that help them utilize the farm sources to their maximum capability.
The couple grows crops ranging from commercial to semi-industrial, from pearl millet (bajra) to wheat, potatoes, moringa, bananas, papaya, Jamun, and wood.
Some of their other strategies, which encompass plug nurseries, no-until vegetable farming, planting windbreaks, fowl-loving plants, and butterfly and bee-loving flora, are a mix of business and experimental farming directed toward pest and soil control in some manner or the opposite.
They have dug trenches and pits on 10 in line with cent of the ample land to capture each drop of rainwater on the ten-acre farm. This ensures that each suitable monsoon cycle helps harvest 5 to 10 lakh liters of water.
The duo also constructed a natural home with soil, cow dung, and stone. The ground to build the earth partitions of this home was sourced from the farm when they dug a pond. One of the motives for digging this pond was to tackle effluent water that a nearby contractor was letting into the sector.
“We were amazed because we had been attempting to avoid chemical input on our farm. We determined to address this by accumulating this water in a pond. We coated the pond with water-purifying varieties of flora that could remove the impurities before they made it to the pond, which captures 1.5 to two lakh liters of water.”
Aiming to turn this pond into a natural world pond, Brinda and Vivek will soon introduce fish and ducks. Vivek is also running on building a larger water-remedy plant that could amplify right into a secondary business sooner or later.
Instead of using pesticides or concoctions to keep pests at bay, the couple uses quintessential natural pest management techniques on the farm, like developing fragrant flowers inclusive of tulsi lemongrass and so forth on the outer limitations of the sphere. These assists create a defensive defense and keep fruit flies and pests at bay. Another approach to ensure that pest attacks do not motivate complete loss is intercropping or multi-cropping, which is the process of developing extra vegetation on an equal piece of land. To ensure that no single leaf on the farm is burned, all farm waste is processed to make compost.
