Seeding a revolution

Software professional Manikandan is a collector. You see his ‘heirlooms’ occupying every square inch of his apartment complex on Bannerghatta Road that his neighbours are happy to grant him — the small gym balcony or the little space under metal stairs.

He welcomes us with a bowl of his very latest: Beautiful orange yellow pear variety of tomatoes. “I can bet you will never see it in stores,” he says.

He has another five offbeat kinds in the process of ripening: one that will soon grow in a fishbone pattern, another that will look like a cherry, and yet another that will have green and white stripes on it. A few metres away, five types of mint rub shoulders with a plant that yields ‘absolutely white’ brinjal. “You know why it’s called egg plant?”

For lack of space, his extensive organic seed collection — some of them heirloom varieties that he sniffs out from here and there — has to be planted as and when the pots and crates are free to accommodate them. Biodiversity excites him and he’s working on keeping it safe for time to come, by replicating the original seed.

What Manikandan executes within his limited space, comes from the extensive experiments that Annadana Soil & Seed Savers conduct on their farms in Bangalore and Auroville. They not only safeguard every known variety of natural seed, multiply and give them away at nominal prices, but also document organic farming techniques that are for anyone who wants to follow them. Director, Annadana, Sangita Sharma is bent on showing the pro ‘high productivity’ hybrid/GM scientist community that organic can yield.

They had done it during tsunami, when they adopted five villages in the Pondicherry belt and turned the saline soil to cultivable soil. “The farmers saw a 40% increase in yield,” says Sangita.

“The UN has stated that organic can feed the world,” she says. In fact, she believes that organic farming done at a community level is the only sustainable paradigm. “GM foods are a threat to biodiversity as cross pollination with the natural seeds will contaminate the seeds to come,” she says.    

Right now, a part of her farm land is being mulched by ploughing sunn hemp over the soil that will decompose, and ready the soil for next crop. On a patch of raised beds, Pavithra, a final year biotechnology student, has planted nitrogen fixing legumes. She has been visiting Sangita’s farm everyday of her vacations and what she has seen has convinced her to go organic. “Organic is totally opposite of what I study in my course, but I think it’s important to know both sides,” she says.

The fact so many people are taking charge of their food is that there have been no conclusive proofs of GM foods being safe. “Genetic modification involves inserting a pig’s gene into cabbage; scorpion’s into corn, soil bacterium’s into brinjal. These genes transfer into the DNA of the bacteria inside your intestines which might turn it into living pesticide factories. These foreign proteins produced may be highly allergenic, toxic or carcinogenic. GM is a lot of things but it is not safe sex,” says Sangita.

The logic speaks to 25-year old chartered accountant, Varun Ravindra, who rather than taking to the desk, took over operations at his family’s 120-acre farm near Hosur two months ago. Till now the farm used the regular farming methods. After watching the documentary Poison on the Platter, he switched over to organic.

“Nature knows the synergy between things. You can’t prod in all the wrong places thinking you know what you are doing,” he says.  Srikanth MA, an Intel employee who farms at Kanakapura on the weekends and his wife Priti share Varun’s concerns of living in an untested world that their representatives do little about. “For Bt Brinjal, the trial data mentioned is for two years. Has anyone looked at the long-term impact that these foods can cause over the next fifty years,” he asks. 

Manikandan has been doing his bit of research into that part of food that he has to buy from stores. He shows us a pamphlet he intentionally took away from a prominent hybrid seed supplier in Bangalore. It lists atleast 10 different chemicals to be added if that seed is sown, at an interval of ten days — not a great thought for someone who uses only organic compost and Panchkavya from the department of horticulture.

Growing vegetables has also confirmed for him what he’d probably only read about before. “If I went to buy cherry tomato seeds from a corporate, they ask for Rs100 for a gram, 1,00,000 for a kg, whereas the department sells it for Rs5 a gram,” he says pointing to what seed monopoly will do to a farmer if GM foods come in. 

“So much damage has already been done. It’s a known thing that cattle that grazed on Bt Cotton fields and the bees that cross-pollinated were adversely affected. But it’s a little known fact that a tomato variety called Caro Rich has 30% more carotene than orange or carrot. But you never see them in the store because they only buy the red thick skin variety that is easier to store and transport. It is aimed at their convenience, not the consumers’,” says Manikandan.

You might want to check out:
Department of horticulture, stocks organic seeds and soil boosters.
Visit Sangita Sharma’s blog at http://myrighttosafefood.blogspot.
com
Track Manikandan’s experiments on geekgardener.wordpress.com
Srikanth’s website: www.vanashree.in, you can drop by his farm on weekends.