Umaramanan \u2013 who most of us know as \u2018Ramanan\u2019 \u2013 has grown up around Auroville in the village of Edyanchavadi. He went to school in Udavi, an Auroville Outreach school. As opposed to many of his peers, he didn\u2019t gravitate towards an office job. Instead, he wanted to work in the forests and farms. \u201cI was interested in green work, and I am really inspired by Auroville since childhood \u2013 It\u2019s the best place to explore yourself and live your life, in my opinion. I have been hearing and seeing what sustainability means here, and for me life should be sustainable, we should not be taking things. Life should be a two-way traffic with nature, a give and take. And that\u2019s what I see in Auroville compared to other cities around. So for my first work experience in the community, I joined Pitchandikulam forest and stayed and worked there for about 6 years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pitchandikulam was Ramanan\u2019s nursery \u2013 here his love for green sprouted into a real dedication. Yet the forest was not the end of the line for him: \u201cIn 2016, I took an Ecovillage Design course, and that was the shift I would say. It triggered the question: What am I doing for the community? What is the basic need? I realised that the most important thing is food. And as Mother said, we need good food to achieve what we want in Auroville. For me, what I learned of the forest was enough, now it was time to focus on producing food for the community. I then came to AuroOrchard and started working here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regenerative Farming<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n AuroOrchard is the oldest farm of Auroville, founded by Mother in 1968, and the second largest in size. It reaches over 44 acres of fruit orchards and meadows, with about 5 acres dedicated to vegetables. \u201cWhat we do here is Regenerative Agriculture, rather than calling it Organic Farming. It means we focus first on taking care of the whole biosystem. We have animals, cows and chickens, as their manure is important in the regeneration. We give more importance to local produce, rather than exotic produce and have about 80 to 90 species of vegetables.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While there has been a real shift in this region with more Organic farmers coming up, Ramanan is looking for a deeper change. \u201cThe farming practices that you see around are all mostly conventional methods of farming, where all the inputs are from industries that make synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Now in the past 10 years, the practice of Organic Farming has grown. People converted from conventional farming to Organic, but the underlying concept didn\u2019t change: They have switched to bio-fertilizers, but they still rely on industries to produce these inputs for them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Regenerative Farming, the focus is on creating a system that sustains itself. \u201cFor this we have to produce 4 things: our own water, fertility, produce, and energy. If you\u2019re not sustainable in each of these 4 aspects, then you can\u2019t call yourself a Regenerative Farm. The ways in which we do this, for water for example, is trying to use water as efficiently as possible, and produce for the next generation too. This means harvesting rain water and recharging your aquifers. So we have percolation pits where we gather as much rainwater as possible to recharge the bore wells. So what we really try to do here is mimicking the forest. Forests take care of themselves and every living organism that is part of it, no one has to do anything. We try to use the smart ways of the forest here on the farm.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/adventure.auroville.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/29216230_972857016210801_6558738369220507686_n-1.jpg\")
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