It’s said that spirituality is the foundation of happiness in it’s purest form. Subhash Palekar, a 66 years old agriculturist from Maharshtra has made it possible for himself. He belongs to Belora village of Amravati district in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region.
Palekar is a very happy man today, more so as he is being conferred India’s fourth highest civilian award Padma Shree for discovering the age old ways of spiritual farming. Palekar is a pioneer of ‘zero-budget spiritual farming’, a technique that he claims has over 40 lakh adherents, three-fourths of them in South India.
While a staunch critic of chemical agriculture, Palekar isn’t supportive of the much-hyped ‘organic farming’ or the Japanese philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka’s ‘natural farming’ either.
According to him organic farming is based on composting and vermicompost techniques that have originated in western countries and these actually pollute the atmosphere. As the resultant manures are known to emit huge quantities of greenhouse gases (methane).
Similarly, Fukuoka prescribes sowing and harvesting without any intervention, whereas this approach only leads to excessive weed growth in farms, affecting crop yields.
Palekar’s method, on the other hand, largely draws from ancient Indian farming techniques, at the heart of which is a formulation called ‘Jiwamrita’. The formulation itself was a revelation that followed appraisal and practical experience of various farming techniques for over two decades. Happyho also provide best tarot reading services in Noida and Delhi NCR India area.
The search for answers led him to conclude that that the so-called modern agricultural practices taught at universities were detrimental to farming. The only terms that got repeatedly hammered in students’ minds are fertilisers, hybrid seeds, insecticides, irrigation, and deep trenches.
He decided to exit his undergraduate agriculture degree programme midway and spent the following two decades on finding answers to agricultural problems based on nature’s teachings. By the year 2000, he had “standardised” his technique of farming centered around ‘Jiwamrita’.
His conclusion is : “The farmer needs to apply to the crop a dose of Jiwamrita — vlog a fermented solution containing 200 litres water, 5-10 litres cow urine, 10 kg dung, 1 kg each of gur (jaggery) and besan (gram flour), and a handful of soil from the farm bund — for every acre. The other important thing is to spread a carpet of harvested crop residue between crop rows, which helps to absorb moisture from the atmosphere and also prevents emergence of weeds.
According to Palekar Jiwamrita basically nurtures thousands of bacteria essential for healthy crop growth. You can get 5-6 quintals of cotton and 3-6 quintals of soyabean per acre in non-irrigated patches. On irrigated patches, these can go up to 10 quintals. Besides he claims that his method contributes to soil health, while increasing the plant’s capacity to even tolerate inundation from heavy rains or hailstorms.
The term zero-budget farming is self-explanatory. All you spend is on seeds and Rs 5,000 per acre for laying the harvested residue carpet, which can be covered by the inter-crop raised on it. So, whatever is obtained from sale of the main crop is your income and there’s no question of farmers committing suicide.
Palekar’s writings have made him popular enough to attract hordes of visitors to his 31-acre farm at Belora, apart from receiving lecture invitations from across the country and even abroad. Today, he spends 25 days of the month on tour to give ‘free’ training sessions to those willing to experiment with his technique.
Among his fans are Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa and her Andhra Pradesh counterpart Chandrababu Naidu.
