A Visit to Bylakuppe

It’s been a few days since I last wrote, but I can’t let this blog go on without talking about our visit to the Tibetan community in Bylakuppe.  I had wanted to visit the South Indian monasteries and mingle with Tibetans since we first arrived in Bangalore and cluttered by bus past Kushalnagar some three weeks ago.  What with being sick and being initiated into life on the farm here, Matt and I had not had even one true day off yet.  So when our first break rolled around last Thursday, we decided to wake up early and catch the bus to Kushalnagar.  Chitra and Lauren, the two other interns here, came along as well, and we had a grand time exploring a new corner of India.

Kushalnagar is in Mysore district in Karnataka, some 1.5 hours from where we live, and outside of Kodagu district, the high-altitude/high-rain area where Mojo Plantation is located and where most Coorgian coffee is grown.  While Kushalnagar is still relatively hilly, much of its forests have been cut, and rather than rainforests mingled with coffee and pepper, fields of corn and wheat stretch out across the valleys.  With mountains in the distance and green fields in between, we were treated to expansive views of the countryside.  According to Chitra, the Tibetans have become experienced agriculturalists since settling here in the 1950s and 60s.  Now they’re tending to cows and corn rather than yak and sheep.

The most well known of the temples here is the Golden Temple, an eye-catching golden-domed Nyingmapa Buddhist center with huge statues and paintings inside.  While beautiful, it was a tad overwhelming in terms of tourist attention.  The temple draws lots of Indian tourists, and because we

were the only westerners around, a few bold ones followed us around trying to snap photos of us.  Happily, we found the kora (circumambulating loop) surrounding the temple and monastery grounds and escaped the crowds.  A plethora of prayer wheels and interesting juxtapositions greeted us on the monastery’s outskirts.

After a lunch of momos and maaza, we met an old woman who explained the system of “camps” that break up the 20,000-strong Tibetan community into neighborhoods localized around five monasteries.  Within Tibetan Buddhism there are four different schools of thought:  Nyingmapa, Gelugpa, Kagyu, and Shakya.  We decided to walk the 4ish kilometers to the Gelugpa monastery, the largest one in the area with 5,000 monks.  Good thing, apparently, since foreigners, are not supposed to visit the other three.  Yet another reminder that Tibetans are still refugees in this country, even though many of those in South India have been here for 50 years (like the woman we talked to), or their whole lives.

The walk to Sera Monastery was perhaps the best part of the day.  We popped into a few thangka (Tibetan religious paintings) studios on the way, and passed monks and cows on their ways home for the night.  We arrived at Sera Monastery to find out that it was the last day of a 10-day vacation for the monks, and the place was fairly deserted.

The place, in some ways, felt like a reincarnation of Tibet.  Monasteries and prayer flags everywhere you looked, a quiet and calm rarely found in India, and monks in red robes going about their business.  I tried my rusty Tibetan out on a few of them, but mostly got confused looks and laughs.  I found myself wishing I knew a friend or two amongst them, and hoping to spend more time in Bylakuppe this year.  The excursion brought me a little peace, beauty, and even a sense of home.

Of Milk and Markets

Yesterday, I milked a cow for the first time in my life.  The cow is named Pathari (stone in Hindi, because she’s black), and her calf is Mahogany.  Mahogany had to wait his turn while we took a share of her milk for our coffee.  The teats were like warm wet toes, and proved pliable under my fingers.  It took a firm pull to induce the milky squirt into the metal pail.  The liquid shot out with such force that a satisfying spray bounced back off the tin side.  Ravi, the usual milker of the cows, held the pail patiently while we all took a turn at this new novelty, and then ably took over when we were satisfied.  He dove in with both hands, pulling in a rhythmic blur until the creamy white filled up half the pail.  He backed away and little Mahogany jumped in, searching desperately for the warm toes to suck.

I have been doing a lot of farm work in the past few weeks -- weeding the pineapples, picking cardamom, planting avocado and mango trees, and harvesting ginger.  My co-intern Chitra and I have taken the lead on creating a new nursery of seedlings and a scattered vegetable garden around the farm (I’ll be posting photos throughout the process here).   So far we have turned five fallow, water-logged raised beds into fertile plots, and have planted beans, brinjal (eggplant) and chili peppers.  Tomorrow we’ll begin a seedbed of orange trees.

The farming is good fun, and is giving me an important foundation for my work here.  But it is just the beginning, I hope.  Tomorrow, I’ll be meeting most of the farmers who last year created the Organic Association of Kodagu.  They’re a group of certified organic farmers who have relatively large land holdings (100+ acres), and who created the cooperative to help each other organize new marketing strategies.  I don’t know much more about them, but I’m prepared with a general questionnaire and a lot of curiosity.  What crops do they grow?  Why did they go organic?  Has it been cost effective?  Where do they sell their produce?

This last question is of particular interest to me.  When I was preparing for this trip, and during my first week on the farm, I kept asking why the local farmers weren’t selling their organic cardamom to foreign markets.  I had even suggested we try selling to a few organic retailers in Philly I knew.  100 grams of organic ground cardamom here sells for just 50 rupees ($1.05).  In the states, I had once bought a smaller spice jar of the stuff for ten bucks.  So it seemed to me like a smart move to go for the best price, and then to funnel that extra money back into education or research programs (the mission of the NGO), or at the least subsidizing crops for home consumption such as fruits and vegetables. 
What I kept hearing, though, was the complaint that in some parts of India, all the produce had been exported to the point that local people were starving.  And then:  “what about the food our children are eating?” they would say.  “We need to have organic choices too.”  This is certainly a valid point, given the near-extreme chemical use of many farms in India.  But what immediately seems obvious to me is that organic farmers also need a market.  They need enough dedicated demand that it justifies the high cost of organic certification, and the added labor and knowledge that organic cultivation requires.  Otherwise, the organic farming movement in India will include only those farmers who can afford to heed their principles and keep chemical inputs out of their soil. 

These are open questions for me at the moment.  Along with learning how to milk a cow and sow a bed of chilis, hopefully I’ll learn a thing or two from this group of farmers about what works and what doesn’t in selling organic produce.

First trip to the Friday Market

Yesterday, we went to the Friday market.  This is the town of Madikeri, rickshaws and shops galore.

Talk about a farmers market!  This place was endless.

 

We brought home a chicken!  Maya (left) named her Jasmine after the flowers we bought at the market.  She's a beauty, but is getting pecked by the other hens..

Finding Our Feet

We’ve been cleaning out beds of turmeric and ginger the last few days, Chitra and I. It has rained too much this September, and the coffee-husk mulch they put down last month, when it was drier, has acidified the soil. The ginger is browning and dying already, exposing its fruitful roots. It is two months early.


There are only ten or eleven beds of these plants, but the work is tedious. We slosh through muddy drainage corridors, then squat to reach between the leafy stalks. Though the Indians we are working with gave us coconut half-shells to scrape the ground, it’s easier with bare hands. We squat on our heels and pull handfuls of decomposing coffee mulch toward us, revealing ants nests, crab holes, and all manner of crawling insects. I decide that I shouldn’t pause long enough to see the insects or else I’ll want to stop. There may be leeches here too, my newfound nemeses. But in a country like India, with a commitment like I have made, refusing squeamish work is not an option. This is a chance to connect with Basanti, the short, capable 29-year old who plants the beds, harvests the crops, cleans the sheets and the guesthouses, and feeds the chickens.

Basanti is a giggler. When she converses with Chitra, it is in Kannada because that’s all she speaks. Chitra speaks her native Tamil, perfect English, and Hindi. All four of these languages float through the raised beds of turmeric and ginger as we remove the acidic husks from the roots. When Basanti discovers a new word in Tamil, she giggles. When she teaches Chitra a new word in Kannada, she giggles. When she slips in her flip-flops on a mossy log, she giggles. She loves her work, knows it well, and enjoys our help, I think.

After we clean the beds of their coffee husks, we sprinkle them with wood ash collected from the spice-drying shed. This is supposed to lower the pH of the soil, and will hopefully revive the browning ginger plants. We’ll see in a few weeks, if the rain ever stops conclusively.


I’ve begun to learn a few basic tenets of organic farming. When Basanti led Chitra and I through Valley IV of the plantation today, we passed the usual crops – coffee, cardamom, vanilla, black pepper – and then noticed a small red impatiens, obviously planted recently. It was squat and delicate, a bit out of place in this tropical environment. Basanti gestured and explained that “madam,” the lead farmer Sujata, likes to plant flowers amongst the crops. It seemed like a nice idea, a way to brighten things up. Later, when we asked Sujata about it, she smiled mysteriously and said, “It’s for the insects. We want more of them.” It is the diversity that makes things tick out here, and a careful eye for indicators like soil pH, water quality, spider numbers, and frog variety. A good farmer lures the right insects to their fields but then directs them to alternative snacks, the non-crop producing plants. This keeps the frogs and the birds around, who will then eat the bad bugs, the borers and the beetles.

The dirty work can be, well, dirty. But there’s no way to connect with farmers without knowing the basics, and without sticking your own hands in the soil.

Around the Farm

Since Matt has already written amply about our illnesses, I'll just post some photos for now of things we have seen and done so far.

Here is our new home, aka our room. I like to call it our bungalow.


This is Fluffy, the turkey. He has a funny little beard, and he cracks us up by gobbling all the time.


The inside of our room. I've been seeing a lot of this in the past few days while getting over a fever. Note the exposed brick walls - what style!


Me being sick in my long-johns.


And a big toad we found last night just before dinner. Lighting effects by Chitra and myself with three headlamps. Photo by Matt.

It Begins

The last leg of our journey to Madikeri and Mojo Plantation was a steep bus ride uphill and into the monsoon. By 7 pm the sky had turned dark. We were suddenly in the mountains after traveling all day by economy bus along the Deccan Plateau. Six hours from Bengaluru, we boarded a second bus in Kushalnagar, just a few kilometers outside of the Tibetan settlement Bylakuppe, and went up from there, barreling in a clunky old school bus around hairpin curves, passing jeeps, vans, and dump trucks along the way. I hadn’t left my seat for nearly eight hours at that point, for fear the bus would leave me behind if I took a break at one of the stops. I was undoubtedly back in India, and waiting for it to sink in.

Earlier in the day, Matt had asked me if it felt much different, if the landscape and the people of South India felt like a new place. In some ways yes, but it has the same quality of messy lushness as what I experienced before. The grass is long and wild, overflowing over riverbanks and poking out between terra cotta shingles. Palm trees and long leafy shrubs jut out between overflowing storefronts, and across the verdant countryside layers of paddies glisten underneath young rice stalks. Laborers wade in up to their knees to pull weeds from the marshy ground. And on our own fertile farm there is cardamom cultivated under coffee, vanilla vines wrapped around every kind of tree, pineapples poking up between randomly interspersed Arabicas and Robustas.

This is precisely what Mojo Plantation is known for. The farm integrates a variety of crops amongst the native rainforest canopy to encourage biodiversity and thereby ensure that no chemical pesticides, fungicides, or fertilizers ever need to be used. They abide by the code of nature – that it is self-regulating, self-healing, and ultimately productive. The farmers here, Anurag and Sujata, also swear that it is economically sound, that over time a farm cultivated in this way will produce just as much, and will run into fewer problems (less pests, less fungus, better soil fertility) than farms using chemicals to force production. It will be part of my work here this year to find out how true this is. But more about that later.

So far, the farm has treated us well. Anurag, Sujata, and their daughter Maya have welcomed us into their home, and the other intern, Chitra, is wonderful (friendly, knowledgeable and Indian, which makes travel and communication much easier for us!). Despite the monsoon, we have seen a multitude of orchids, birds, frogs, and toads, and have gone on a few dry hikes. We live near the top of the hill here, and an easy walk through the fields and forest rewards us with excellent views of the surrounding valleys and hills. The shola grassland on the hilltop is remarkably different from the tropical valleys below; isolated acacia trees are the only tall foliage up there. Matt and I are overcoming our first challenges here (a fever for Matt, and leeches for me), and are looking forward to diving into the work, the community, and the culture.