Field Visit: Ingenuity of Intercropping Pepper and Coconut
Off to the field we go again! :) This time for a day-long farm visit to learn the intricacies of growing pepper as an intercrop with coconut. Thanks to Isha Foundation’s farmer outreach and training team for bringing 100+ farmers together to visit four different farms in Vadakadu near Alangudi in Puthukkottai district, Tamil Nadu.
Popular understanding is that pepper grows only in hilly regions, not in the plains. However, visiting these four farms corrected that misconception within the first half hour. Farmers here are cultivating pepper profitably for quite a long time. Farmer P, the most experienced farmer, has been growing pepper for over 20 years! There is an interesting backstory for how pepper arrived in Puthukkottai. Many years ago, Farmer P was working in a pepper-growing region in Kerala. He overheard a few farmers lamenting the lack of sun and heat that year which was causing reduced yield in their precious pepper crop. His immediate thought was that his native region had sun and heat in abundance. Overabundance in fact! ;) He decided to test pepper cultivation in just one acre. Thus, the first few hundred pepper saplings arrived in Puthukkottai for their trial run.
Farmer P has experimented with 36+ available varieties of pepper to pick the 6 that grow well in the plains. He has tested various ways of seeding and planting pepper to finally arrive at the “propagate the sapling in a small bag, transfer to farm” method. He expanded his acreage slowly. In addition to all this, he has been instrumental in promoting this idea to his fellow farmers, sharing knowledge freely, selling saplings, and providing extension service when someone has an issue with the crop. Together with two early adopters, Farmer P has become the informal advisory council for newbies. With all this, they have managed to create a flourishing network of pepper farmers in their district. Now they had an audience that had arrived at their farm from all corners of Tamil Nadu, hoping to carry their methods back to their own lands.
What did we learn during the visit? Pepper can grow in any region that has a sufficient mix of coolness, sunlight, and shade. It is not a water hungry crop. Irrigating once every 10–15 days is sufficient. Pepper is a climber. Any strong tree with large girth (teak, gliricedia, kiluvai, mul murungai, etc) can be a good growth vehicle or host. Most plant management effort goes into pruning, helping pepper climb its host appropriately, and occasionally providing organic / bio fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers have been tried, but discarded since they were not fruitful. Pepper starts providing income in three years. An acre of pepper intercrop can yield upto 4 quintals or 400 kilos of pepper (current market price of pepper).
The most important learning however was how ingenuity is an integral part of farmers’ lifestyle. It is a critical survival skill, especially in resource-constrained environments.
