Let’s talk about farming

Marturi Vasant Naidu believes he has farming in his genes. “My family and my community have always been into farming,” says the man who had gone on a 9,000-plus km journey around the country on a bicycle four years ago.

So, not surprisingly, his notes from the trip were related to farming. Today, Vasant is bubbling with ideas on how to revolutionise the sector that is still, largely the backbone of India.

In a talk at Lamakaan last week, he spoke about how farming in India needed an overhaul. “The problem is that we are not putting the best of our minds into the sector. There is no one pursing agriculture with passion. It has become a last resort of sorts, an option for those who don’t do well academically,” he says.

His vision is to have more and more people apply their knowledge to boost the sector. In other words, technological development. “If there was one thing I learnt from cycling around the country, it was that jargons like ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘self-sustenance’ don’t matter. There is no running away from urbanisation. Why should this sector do without development? All that matters is more directed action. For instance, imagine someone trained in engineering putting his time into farming, the outcome is something like an app to trigger irrigation systems from the mobile,” he says.

The 2011 trip was fuelled initially by just Vasant’s desire to see the country, but it turned out to be an eye-opener from where these ideas were born. “The idea was to really enjoy the sights and sounds while on the road. So I picked a cycle to take this trip,” he shares about his trip that started on August 15, 2011 and ended in December.

The trip also changed the way he farms and the ideas just keep cropping up. “With more than a thousand photographs that I have from different parts of the country, I could even document the cattle breeds from across India,” he says.