Andhra Pradesh Community managed Natural Farming

The Andhra Pradesh Community managed Natural Farming or APCNF project is the only active government run natural farming program I could find in India. They have a Youtube channel that has a large number of videos showing the principles and practices that are recommended to farmers, but most of them are in Telugu. Even though I follow a bit of it, I was not able to get the full details of specific procedures they recommend to the farmers. Vijay Kumar, who heads the APCNF organization, has promised in one of the webinars held recently, that, the content will soon be translated to English for the benefit of people from the other states of India.

One of the most valuable finds from the APCNF channel was the lecture by Walter Jehne, an Australian microbiologist and cliamtologist, on Regenerative Agriculture. His theory is that the natural systems like soil and forests have kept the climate in a steady state through millions of years through the natural process of rainfall and transpiration. The destruction of forests and soil to acquire land for modern industrial scale agriculture has had more impact on global temperatures than increase in CO₂. By restoring these systems, we can bring down global temeperatures. Also restoring the soil goes a longer way in capturing rainfall than building dams and other irrigation projects.

APCNF itself uses these theories and applies them to the farming practices followed by actual farmers which is were the real test lies. For a short overview on APCNF, I would recommend this booklet called Taking Agroecology to Scale by an organisation called Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), which had studied APCNF with the goal of applying the learnings in Africa.

My own journey in farming has been influenced till now by Masanobu Fukuoka, Nammazhvar, Roland Bunch and my own experience battling the arugampul (Cynodon dactylon) ridden compacted soil for the past 1.5 years (since January 2023).

Below, I have collected my thoughts on the APCNF principles and how I can integrate them into my own practice.

365 days of ground cover

It is obvious that having something growing throughout the year maximizes the capture of solar energy and adds more biomass to the soil. But this is also important for keeping the soil life alive and ready for the next crop. Also, soil with growing plants capture more of the rain water than barren soil.

The main challenge in my land is supplying the required soil moisture for growing crops througout the year. The well on my farm has sufficient water for irrigation only during January to March, which is after the heavy North East monsoon during the months from October to December. There are a few scattered showers during the months of April and May, but they are not sufficient to establish any new crop. The South West monsoon which starts in June, brings intermittent rainfall, but I haven't been able to retain enough moisture for a successful crop in 2023 without additional irrigation. During the NE monsoon season of 2023, I had the reverse problem of water stagnation on my bunded field. I had missed to promptly drain the fields after the bouts of heavy rains.

To address these,
1. I need to identify crops that are suitable for each of these seasons. A crop that is already established during during January and February can withstand the hot and dry months of March to May. So intercropping a short duration crop and a longer duration crop could be a solution.
2. The sequence of crops is also important. For example, it is better to grow a grain or food crop after mucuna as it leaves the field rich with nitrogen and reduced weed growth. Also, I am hoping that as the soil structure improves, it can percolate more of the rain water allowing plant growth during the dry spells.
3. I also need to find an alternative to mucuna which requires lesser water, as I will not have sufficient water for irrigation if I increase the land under cultivation. Canavalia (thamattai avarai in Tamil), is supposed to be more drought tolerant than mucuna.
Diverse crops including trees

Multi cropping i.e. growing more than one crop in the same field is a big part of APCNF's recommendation. This is not just a legume and a grain intercopped, but 8 to 12 species grown together.

It is surely a challenge to grow so many varied crops in the same field close together, even though I do everything with just manual labour. Harvesting becomes more complex and I have to go through multiple passes, picking each of the crop separately. Some crops like mucuna cannot be grown together with other crops as they grow aggresively and bury other plants below their lush growth, if there is sufficient water for them to grow. Similarly, I have seen Horsegram also smother other plants.

Another big part of this recommendation is growing trees along with field crops. The trees supposedly provide shade and reduce evaporation of moisture from the top layers of the soil. This would be useful especially during the months from March to May when it might not be possible to have field crops growing due to lack of water, whereas the trees with deeper roots would continue to be growing. The trees can be pruned before establishing the next crop in June or July to provide adequete sunshine for the field crop. The leaves and small branches from the pruned trees can be used as mulch. This technique is also called Alley cropping i.e. growing field crops between hedged rows of trees and is a well established practice.

Based on this,
1. I need to determine compatibility matrix of each crop with the others. From this, I need to create guilds of crops that can be grown together. Combining this with the seasonal elements is going to be interesting.
2. I need to find the perennial trees and long duration plants that can be grown on the hedge rows. I think it might be difficult to grow fruit trees in this manner as the field crop is going to get the higher priority in terms of when the tree will be pruned. Leguminous trees like Agathi(Sesbania grandiflora) and Gliricidia are a good option. I also plan to expriment with trees that are naturally dispersed in my field like the Neem tree, Pencil Maram (Acacia auriculiformis) and the Palm tree. Timber trees like Teak are also be a good option.
3. Another interesting technique I intend to follow is called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration. This is the technique where the farmer nurtures and grows the tree saplings that naturally popup every year all over the field and were sown by birds, squirrels and other animals. What a joy it is, to work with nature! If left to nature, it is very much capable of turning the land into robust forest in a decade, but we then lose our ability to grow field crops. So we still need to decide which saplings and how many, we nurture and which ones we destroy. This technique doesn't create neat rows of trees like in alley cropping, but the trees end up disperesed all over the field. Nevertheless, the utility should still be the same with no major disadvantages.
No/low till

This was one of the key principles of Fukuoka and the primary technique which pulled me into farming. I have clearly seen, from my experience, how tilling destroys the soil structure that nature had tirelessly built.

But starting from a compacted soil, it is very difficult to grow the first few years of crop. Usually it is recommended to start with a well tilled field without grass or weeds and follow no till from the second year onwards. For some reason, I am not inclined to do it. Maybe, I want to prove the power of nature in restoring even a compacted degraded soil without fossil fuel inputs.

The only disturbance I am doing is to dig a 1 feet wide trench every 1.5 meters which I use for irrigation and also as a drainage mechanism during rains. I use the soil from the trenches to form the tall bunds which demarcate the fields and retain the water. The trenches can also be used to hold excess biomass after laying out as mulch on the beds. The trenches are dug perpendicular to the slope of the land and slows down the flow of water and helps in percolation. It also provides a path to walk within the field for inspection and harvesting. In effect the field looks like parallel rows of raised beds, which makes the job of sowing a lot more cumbersome than broadcasting on flat rectangular field.

I have not been able to perform a true Fukuoka style broadcast sowing using seed balls. I am forced to hoe down the grass atleast an inch or two after I broadcast, without which the seeds do not have sufficient contact with the soil and are likely to be eaten away. Also hoeing kills the weeds and without which there is too much competition for the crop to get established. This is a back breaking work and is not scalable.

I have been fascinated by Krishna McKenzie's technique of sowing rice over a cover crop of mucuna. Mucuna forms a dense layer of vegetation which suppresses grass and other weeds and the crop grown after, is able to establish quickly without much competition. The effort in preparing the soil by hoeing and drilling the seeds is greatly reduced. We simply broadcast the seeds over the growing mucuna plants and then we enter the field to cut the vines and shake it to ensure the seeds reach the soil and lay the cut vines over it. There is sufficient disturbance when pulling at the vines and stepping on the soil, to lightly bury the seeds. The leaf litter and vines also cover the seeds to hide them from birds and also decay quickly to form an additional layer of rich soil over the seeds. Also the crop gets to use the nitrogen fixed by mucuna, in addition to the nitrogen from the decaying green leaves.

I have already tried this over one season, but had to still hoe to remove the weeds that refused to be suppressed. I was also not confident that the seeds would get buried enough to have proper germination. I think over the years, the weed pressure should reduce so that I can skip the hoeing.

Going forward
1. I need to monitor the effort needed to sow on these raised beds vs a flat field. There are tradeoffs between sowing effort and the better irrigation between the two.
2. I need to perfect the technique of sowing over a cover crop of mucuna as a scalable mechanism for planting and weed control. I should try this out with other grains like bajra and ragi and also experiment with other cover crops like canavalia, instead of mucuna.
3. I need to really evaluate if making seed pellets is worth the effort compared to sowing over mucuna. This will allow me to have two continous crops instead of having to reserve one crop for mucuna.
Integrate animals into farming

Animals require more active care and constant human presence. I want to establish a farming practice where I would only be present on the farm for a few days of the week. If I had farm animals, I would have to employ someone who needs to stay with the animals 24/7. This complicates the whole model. This might be something I might consider later, but I decided to avoid using animals for now.

I still get dung from cows that the villagers graze on the uncultivated parts of my land and also the adjacent land. The villagers do collect the manure dropped and take it with them to their own fields, but, I have been able to collect some for myself and have experimented with making crude Jeevamurtham that I add to the irrigation water.

Manavari Velanmai is a traditional agriculture practice, where the farmer tills the soil and sows the seeds before the rain and comes back to the field only to harvest. So, there are precedences for avoiding constant presence in the farm.

I do fancy growing hens, but it needs to wait until I have the food grain business going sustainably.
Use of bio stimulants

APCNF recommends adding solid and liquid bio-stimulants made from manure and plant carbohydrates and also making Fukuoka style seed pellets treated with the same.

As mentioned above, I have made a bit of crude Jeevamrutham, but could not see visible impact.

Getting good quantity of clay for making the pellets has been a challenge. I have made small quantities of clay by dissolving the soil from my farm in water and letting the water drip out of the solution through something like a cheese cloth. But could not find an easy way to grind the dried clay blocks to a powder to use in the pelletization process.

Taking this forward,
1. I need to find a good way to grind the processed dry clay and expriment with pelletization, atleast on a small scale.
2. I need to evaluate the effectiveness of these bio stimulants in a more appropriate scenario. I also need to experiment using the palm fruit as a free sugar source for making these bio stimulants.
Crop residue and mulch

This matches Fukuoka's method of leaving the crop residue as a mulch over the broadcasted seeds. I have clearly noticed the soil below the mulch retain moisture better than the bare soil. This is also a key part of the Green Manure Cover Crop practice advocated by Roland Bunch.

Maximizing the organic matter production is a key requirement for this. I am using cover crops like mucuna and sunn hemp purely for organic matter production, although I don't have any other uses for them.
1. I need to evaluate more dual purpose crops, which produce food in addition to large amount of bio mass. Some crops to try, include, Canavalia (thamattai avarai in Tamil) which looks to be bit more palatable than mucuna and pigeon pea (tuvarai in Tamil) which is similar to sunn hemp in growing in poor soil and withstanding drought.
Farmer's own seed or local seeds

This is very import to make farming self reliant without any external input, but, having sufficient quantity of seed stock of the right variety needed for the season is difficult. Selling seeds on a small scale is made more difficult by a number of laws that purport to maintain seed quality. So the farmer needs to maintain their own robust seed bank. Vialbility also reduces when stored for multiple years, along with insects attacking the seeds. So the seeds need to be regularly replaced with fresh seeds from growing crops.

I have started out with buying most of my seeds from the local agricultural supply stores around Tindivanam. These are likely commercial varieties that might be bred to take advantage of chemical inputs. I haven't tried heirloom seeds yet.

I have been able to replenish my seed bank with my own seeds for mucuna and sunn hemp, but doing it for the food crops like, green gram, cow pea etc. has been difficult as I end up storing the seeds incorrectly leading to insect atack.

Going forward,
1. I need a more disciplined storage method and a way to track their age.
2. I need to study the characterstics of different varities of the same crop to select seeds suited for my climate, soil and the style of natural farming that I perform.
Pest & disease management through botanical ingredients

I have not faced any significant crop loss due to pest attack, likely because, the yield is already low due to other reasons. Also, it is said that, the pests attack only weak crops and when external fertilizers, either manure or artificial, is added, weak crops crowd out the field over the hardy ones and later end up getting attacked by pests. This leads to significant crop loss compared to just letting these weak crops die early and letting the hardy crops provide a lower yield.

Hopefully I would be able to find right balance between the two.
Strict NO to chemical inputs

Obviously this is the easist principle to follow if you aren't constrained by needing high yields. In addition to saving money, chemicals like Glyphosate which is used as a weedicide, pose a risk to human health. Here I prefer using the precautionary principle of not using a technique that has a risk of damaging human health than waiting for it to be proven.

I have learnt a lot from studying APCNF. Using it as a framework for evaluating my current practice has given me a confidence that I am going in the right path and given me a number of new ideas that I can try out and improve on. I now have a better picture of what my end goal looks like in my journey to grow food without using fossil fuels.