Saguna Baug is an inspiring story of the transformation of a degraded piece of land into a productive farm integrated with cereal crops, multi-purpose trees, farm animals and aquatic fauna.

Largely the work of farmer Chandrashekhar Bhadsavle, the farm serves as a beacon of hope for small farmers. Proximity to Mumbai proved a bane for Karjat taluk in Maharashtra’s Raigad district. Rapid industrialisation has enticed almost 90 per cent of the region’s small farmers to sell their tiny landholdings, even though the region is blessed with 150 inches of annual rain and good soil conditions.

Saguna Baug, on the other hand, persisted in tapping the region’s natural strengths to grow food crops, rear livestock and fish, and promote the surrounding wild biodiversity.

Converting the degraded ancestral land into a productive landscape proved daunting at first for the US-trained food technologist Bhadsavle back in the late 1980s.

After seven unsuccessful years in agriculture, the desperate farmer learnt the art of catching dreaded snakes in the wilderness of the farm. His family disapproved, but catching snakes and selling venom soon became a profitable vocation for him. He ploughed the income back into farming. The creation of rain-fed ponds in one-third of the farm and efforts to improve its canopy cover are the foundation on which its success rests today.

An integrated farming system keeps the land productive through the year, and Saguna Baug is now considered a ‘farmer field school’, which shares new practices with peers.

Besides the wide variety of cereals, pulses, fruits and trees growing in it, 60 kinds of birds and a dozen fish species inhabit the farm. Three hectares of water bodies yield more than 8,000kg of fish annually. Ten truckloads of bamboo are sold annually.

Additionally, Bhadsavle has over the years perfected the Saguna Rice Technique (SRT), which lowers production cost by cutting on labour and reducing erosion. Rice is cultivated on permanent raised beds to avoid ploughing, puddling and transplanting. As the technique involves using residual moisture, the farmer can easily cultivate two crops in a year.

Saguna Baug religiously follows zero tillage to retain the roots of the older crop in the post-harvest soil. The root network prevents the soil from cracking, creates aerobic pathways after it dries up, contributes organic carbon to the soil, helps retain soil moisture, and, thereby, lowers water consumption for the next crop by 40-50 per cent.

With zero tillage, paddy-leafy vegetable-groundnut rotation generates ₹2 lakh from an acre, while an annual sugarcane crop fetches half of that.

The experiments have attracted the attention of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, as well as private and international agencies looking for collaborative initiatives.

The writer is an independent environment services professional

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