Food Forests Ep 2
Meeting with Sandeep Saxena, Founder, Aranyaani
“ Our way of farming enables achievement of sustainable and regenerative growth with huge positive impact on the ecosystem, particularly the top soil and Earth, and water flows around us. Multi-layer farming/forestry supports biodiversity and involves no tilling, no pesticides and no artificial inputs.”
Link: http://aranyaani.in
Our meeting was getting postponed from many weeks, often one of us was tending to lands that where we work, sometimes the business of city life. On one such postponing, he said — “I keep my sunlight hours for work (tending to land), meetings after that.” However this meeting did end up happening on an afternoon.
We met at his home in Bhopal. A house with plenty of natural light and feeling of openness from all sides. A minimalist home which also doubled up as a homeschooling lab for his 3 yr old. It had the markings of ongoing learning experiments of his son. A bookshelf with many books on Hindu philosophy, to which he later attributed as one of the philosophical sources for Aranyaani, derived from Aranyika.
Following thoughts emerged in the meeting –
o “There are only two types of farming — chemical farming and food forests. Everything else is noise.” Organic, permaculture, biodynamic etc. are all compromised in their philosophical purity, and are basically techniques being applied in different contexts. Fukuoka, was an odd one, as he never built a program or technique around his ideas, but simply propagated a philosophy.
o Hindu mythology offers useful symbolism, just like Lakshmi, saraswati, ganesh always appear together it reflects the need for presence of intellect, money and people/execution for success of any endeavor. One of the reason for failure of projects is not having an end to end philosophical construct.
o The steps are to find out the WHY, build a solid theory, separating yourself, finding out how it can expand to other people and a success/monetization plan. Having this end to end planning is important for the project to tread on.
o It took Sandeep 11 years to reach his philosophical clarity about his work. It has been an experimental process.
o Some people in natural farming sector have deeply married to the idea but the other people don’t see them as success/prosperous — hence they appreciate the idea but do not adopt it.
o सहजता is important. One pressures worth taking is the pursuit of developing a clear thought process/philosophy/why. The self awareness that thought is incomplete/shallow is crucial.
o Money and fame is secondary, always the means.
o Compromises to your idea/philosophy can start pulling you in opposite direction and completely disintegrate your project idea.
o Learn to differentiate between good and bad consumers(and other stakeholders) Stakeholders unaligned with your ideas will pull you in unwanted directions. This is important in the beginning. Sandeep shared his example, that many of his customers want honey, but now he has stopped supplying to them, now he is only supplying to those who are willing to take the entire range of produce, otherwise the honey seeking consumers will pull the whole food forests towards honey producing farms eventually.
