South India – Day 6, part 2
Monday, February 10, 2025
Busy Siby
Though Siby is no longer employed at Vanamoolika, he continues to support them, providing training on various organic farming topics whenever asked. Presently, he is helping a new co-operative that formed four years ago get organic certification. On his own twelve acres you can find him farming as well, raising black pepper, coconut, nutmeg, cloves, rice, coffee, and vegetables. He grows areca nut, too, the culprit in making red tongues and lips across South and Southeast Asia. Also, known as betel nut, a lot of folks enjoy chewing it for the sake of… for the sake of…. Well, I don’t exactly know why they chew it, but they must have a good reason. I’ll ask next time I have a chance.
By the way, Siby wanted me to tell you that he has a YouTube channel called Trails of Nature. The images of Wayanad are beautiful, but if you want to catch those farming tips, you’ll need to brush up on your Malayalam.
https://www.youtube.com/@TrailsofNature
Living soil
As we headed back down the hill, we stopped in to see their compost. Since they don’t use synthetic fertilizers, composting is serious business and they put a lot of effort into making it perfect. It is their investment into next year’s healthy crop. The only part we drink is the brackish water that filters through the ground-up beans. But in nature, there is no such thing as waste. Everything is cycled back into supporting life. So, those parts of the coffee that they don’t sell, the unripe cherries, the pulp, everything organic, is composted for three to six months together with cow dung, dried leaves, rice husk and VAM, and goes right back under the coffee trees.
Since you might not know what VAM is, let me explain. It stands for Vesicular-Arbuscular Mycorrhiza, and it stimulates root growth and nutrient absorption. Healthy soil is living soil, and VAM is part of that life. They produce it specially, by planting maize grass, where it grows naturally on the roots. Then the grass, its roots and the VAM are all mixed with the other coffee parts to make their super compost! This local way of making compost is different from the bokashi Siby learned at ARI, but ARI expanded his understanding of making and using compost overall. I was happy to hear him say that, because this is exactly what ARI aims to do – not copy, but adapt.
Ayurvedic
Our next stop was the building for Ayurvedic medicine processing. The machines were silent today, but with the ladies growing 700 different types of medicinal plants, I imagine there are times when this place is really buzzing. Most often the process starts with drying the herbs and there were huge wood burning ovens for this. Then there is the grinding with each herb requiring a different grinding technique for maximum efficacy. One of these was a large millstone that ran on electric power rather than human power. Next comes the bottling or packaging. I’m afraid that is as far as my learning went for that day, a drop in the ocean, when you consider people for generations have spent their whole lives developing Ayurvedic medicines. Perhaps I should sign up for an internship one day!
Wait, I almost forgot one fascinating thing. It’s the “brain tonic” they make for children, to give them that extra edge in school. Made from water hyssop, or “brahmi,” it is molded into a paste and kids are fed a ½ teaspoon every day. I’m sure they love that. One of the greenhouses we passed was full of brahmi.
Pepper, Madame?
And now we come to the pepper area where the ladies are busily removing clusters of peppercorns from their vines. Did you know that all the different colored peppercorns are from the same plant? Pepper is picked when it is still green and how it is processed determines the final color. So, green peppercorns are those just harvested, still wearing their green skins. The pepper turns black when the skin is dried. To make brown pepper, the peppercorns have to be dried under the sun. For white pepper you remove the skin completely and if you want red pepper, you have to wait until the peppercorns ripen fully. So, there you have it. After this visit to South India, I tend to give pepper a little more thought and appreciation than I ever did in the past. Now, when I grab the pepper mill while I am cooking, I give it a couple of extra twists.
The spices of life
Saving the best for last, we come to the organic shop. Cardamom coffee, high quality leaf tea, dried jackfruit and papaya, black rice, jaggery sugar, moringa powder, fermented pepper, every spice you could name and every kind of herbal medicine for every kind of ailment. So many wonderful products and I wanted to buy them all. These are the real deal. Freshly made, grown in these hills. We’ve all stood in front of those rows of little spice bottles in the supermarket, our eyes rapidly moving across the labels searching for the one we want. But have we ever considered what is really in those bottles? The grandeur of the trees they grow on. The aroma they pass into the breeze. The farmers caring for them every day. The many, many steps needed to make these fruits into a preservable powder, all for the sake of adding flavor to our lives. How extraordinary it was to witness this from its starting point.
Nice Restaurant
In the afternoon, Siby took me an organization called Solidarity, where we met Narayanan (2002 ARI Graduate). Naran, as he went by at ARI, has spent much of his life advocating for the Adivasi. It was for this work that he and his friends established Solidarity and built this center. I’m sure you see another story on the horizon, but it’s been a big day. We’ll be coming back here in the morning, and there will be plenty of time to talk then. Let’s take it easy for a while and go have dinner at a nice restaurant. It’s a good thing there is a nice restaurant in town – literally. It’s called “Nice Restaurant!” Today, butter chicken is on the menu.
a “W” and three “S”s
Have you experienced, during your travels, the situation where you can hardly keep your eyes open and want nothing more than to go to bed, but courtesy requires you to stay up and talk with your extremely kind and very chatty hosts for hours and hours more? Well, I have, but not on this trip. I am only bringing it up so I can assume the role of chatty host and keep you on a little longer. That is because I forgot to introduce you to the Wayanad Social Service Society (WSSS), who kindly provided me with free accommodations. Their website is excellent so I won’t keep you long.
WSSS was founded in 1974 by the Catholic Diocese of Mananthavady. “Catholic,” explains its director, Fr. Jinoji, “but serves everyone.” The scale and depth of their activities is impressive with more than 40, projects, 19 currently running, and a staff of over 200. Both Siby and Naran got early experience in their careers here.
Their path into the communities is through SHGs. Do you remember this acronym from before? It is Self Help Groups and WSSS helps farmers, women, communities, and tribal people to organize into them. The good thing about SHGs is that they allow people to rely on and uplift each other, rather than become dependent on the organization.
Designating WSSS as “the best project in the diocese,” Fr. Jinoji ran through a list of their activities so quickly I could barely get it all down. One thing that particularly caught my attention was the community radio station. It is called Radio Mattoli and has extension education programming in tribal languages. One of the things I have learned at ARI is just how effective radio is in reaching rural communities. From Malawi to the Philippines several of our graduates are involved in local radio. It is often farmers’ only source for critical information like weather forecasts and current market prices.
Regarding agriculture, WSSS went organic in 1999 and now works with about 20,000 organic farmers. 16,000 of these have gained that all important certification, which means WSSS can assist them with processing and marketing. They do that through a company they set up called Biowin. (You may recall that stuff about Indian law I fuzzily mentioned earlier). We are going to visit Biowin tomorrow, but briefly I will mention that they process coffee, spices, fruits, and vegetables and export to 36 countries in Europe. The company ensures fair prices for its farmers, even going above the market price when they can. For minor spices they can even go double!
The WSSS website really is beautiful. If you want to know what else was on Fr. Jinoji’s list, take a look – https://wsssindia.in/
