Solitude is the name of another neighborhood within the larger intentional community of Auroville. Krishna MacKenzie and his partner started this 7-acre farm several years ago in the curvilinear wedge land zoned for agriculture and industry. They adhere to the principals of no-till agriculture and partnership plantings — practices which demand you know much more about living things than how to dump chemicals on them — where mutually beneficial species are sown together into a single plot of land.
Because there is little cultivation, the life of the soil is given space to grow, and soil fertility contributes to the robust health and growth of the plants. Sometimes it detracts from the health and growth of a single plant or species, because this richness of life includes insects and stronger varietals, which can crowd out some desirable produce. However, the goal is always the same: increase life. Do not use toxins to push natural processes into your timeline, but become wiser, become more subtle in your contact with the earth… become a Master… that through greater intimacy with a given piece of land and its weather you might gently guide the earth’s elements to work for you.
An example of this is Solitude’s intersowing of pulses with rice, a technique developed, proposed, and manifested by Japanese-born agronomist Masanobu Fukuoka. Over the course of 20 years of zero cultivation, he took a dead hillside and transformed it into a thriving forest of life. In his process you plant rice and allow it to grow to near harvest, intersowing barley pellets (seed covered with a thin layer of clay to reduce “poaching” by birds) while the crop is still standing. When the rice is harvested, stalks and all are laid over the barley, following the progression of an untouched field in nature, protecting the sprouting seed from birds and from heavy sun, and trapping in moisture as a green mulch. The barley rises and is harvested. I believe they work in a rotation of clover or another nitrogen-fixer between plantings as well.
Here, Krishna has planted tall stands of papaya and banana, with an understory planting of pineapple and other crops. While full sun is better for pineapple growth, the land beneath the tree crops would otherwise go unused… two crops for the price of one. If the economics are not forced to conform to a global market, but to feed a local population, the greatest gain for a parcel land is when the most life has been generated.
Solitude is a beautiful and rustic spot under the South Indian sun. We helped rush drying peanuts into shade so that coming rain would not wet them, bringing molds. We ate food freshly cooked after being freshly harvested… a dream, if a hard-won dream. But then, all farming is hard-won, well-won. That fact that you can farm with vision, with skill, and with spirit makes the physical labor involved small compared to the riches which are collected.
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The whole place has mashed together all the little playgrounds of my life into one giant Indian playground. I have begun reading Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, a work in English poetry that would have been in all the course curricula of all schools — had we even the slightest penchant for inner awareness in our general culture. Well, maybe I found it 20 years later than I would have liked… but I found it!