“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 to taking a fee of their health turned into gaining knowledge to cook dinner together.
“And yet, considered one of our largest struggles was, we didn’t realize in which the meals we had been consuming every single day become coming from,” 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 once more and growing their very own meals turned into how they thought they might savor it once more. The couple set out on a journey to research the permaculture standards in a state no longer far away from California. It turned into this ride that bolstered their solution to return to India and set up their farm.
“When we had been visiting for the path, we got here throughout a strawberry field. Just as we have been taking part in the view, we saw a person dressed in a white shielding jumpsuit spraying some liquid onto the plants. It sent a kickback down our spines. Imagine if the workers needed to put on a protecting layer to save you the aspect-results of their spraying chemicals; we were ingesting the meals that become being grown like that. It now not most effectively affected the consumers, 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. But the course we did helped us immensely in expertise the diverse techniques we could undertake to construct a herbal and sustainable farm. We decided to kickstart our journey via growing what we preferred to consume first. Being Gujjus, it had to be mangoes,” he laughs.
In 2017, an hour and a half pressure faraway from Ahmedabad, they bought a ten-acre land located at the outskirts of Nadiad, Central Gujarat, to create a farm which would now not best fulfill the wishes in their kitchen and make them unbiased of the market however additionally take in industrial operations.
And that’s how Brindavan came about. From making sure soil fertility with strategies including green manuring and controlled grazing to harvesting rainwater via pits and ditches, the duo exercise strategies that help them utilize the farm sources to their maximum capability.
From pearl millet (bajra), wheat, potatoes, moringa, bananas, papaya, Jamun to wooden, the couple grows crops that variety from commercial to semi-industrial.
Some of their other strategies, which encompass plug nurseries, no-until vegetable farming, planting windbreaks, fowl-loving plants, 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 that falls on the ten-acre farm. This ensures that each suitable monsoon cycle helps harvest 5 to 10 lakh liters of water.
The duo has additionally constructed a natural domestic with soil, cow dung, and stone. The ground to build the earth partitions of this home changed into moreover sourced from the farm itself when they dug a pond. One of the motives to dig this pond also becomes to tackle effluent water that a nearby contractor was letting into the sector.
“We were amazed because we had been attempting out fine not to allow any shape of 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 put off the impurities earlier than it 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 in it. 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 defend and preserve fruit flies and pests at bay. Another approach to ensure that pest attacks do not motive complete loss is intercropping or multi-cropping, which’s the process of developing or extra vegetation on an equal piece of land. To ensure that no longer a single leaf at the farm is burned, all of the farm waste is processed to make compost.
