Ajoy Thipaiah
Ajoy is a fourth-generation coffee planter who has spent his adult life combining traditional and scientific processes of cultivation and conservation in Kerehaklu - a farm/eco retreat/ and home to shade grown coffee.
Ajoy Thipaiah - Interview

If I can go back the early 80s when I was in my mid-20s, rain was like clockwork. Come the end of March, you would expect a certain quantity of rain, and then April-May showers. The monsoon would hit in the first week of June. Everything was so regimented as far as climate and the monsoons and the rains went. Now we have this pattern has changed, you get a lot more rain - it comes in huge quantums, or you get too little of it. So in a way the totals are right up there, but it’s not well spread out like in the old days. So you either have too much or too little of it. And then there are periods of rain when you don’t want rain, or you want rain and you don’t have enough - we have seen this over the last 15 years. Your mean average temperatures also. In summer- you can go upto 31 or 32, and those are the temperatures that we never saw in the old days.

Sounds from his childhood:When we were in our teens, we would regularly hear the sounds of the jackal, and now you don’t hear this anymore - probably jackals have been eradicated. The other sound is the call of the Langur, we never heard the call of the langur over here (before). This is an indication that the Langurs are coming into the area because the forests are getting drier, faster. Probably due to the lack of springs and surface moisture - in turn, there’s not much vegetation that’s greener for a longer time. So the moment that dries up, they come into higher ground. In fact this morning I heard the call of the Langur. A hoot- a very distinct call of the Langur, a new call for me.

Ajoy Thipaiah - Interview
Abhishek Jain - Interview
Abhishek Jain
Abhishek is a naturalist and organic farmer - practicing ecologically sound agriculture for over 25 years. Abhishek's work focuses on reforestation and spreading knowledge of wild edible plants, in his community and through his farm - Magnolia Mist.
Abhishek Jain - Interview

In just 10 years that I’ve been here, the number of chainsaws and mechanization in agriculture have increased. In these valleys sound really travels. More than a kilometer, you can hear someone using a chainsaw. 10 years ago, you never heard it.

I’ve seen what coffee does to the Southern Western Ghats. It’s very wasteful - in the way that it’s being done - I think, if you go back 25-30 years, where people were not so greedy, they were okay to get a bit less coffee out of the land. It was a lot more responsible, you retained the local trees, which supported a lot of biodiversity.

Being someone who enjoys coffee, I can see why it's tough to explain what coffee is doing to the planet. So I think for me the challenge is to find a way to grow coffee in a responsible way”

Krishna: How do you get other people to start considering a culture of mindful consumption ?
A: With coffee planters, it’s very very difficult. In Coorg I’ve interacted with quite a few planters, and they’ve all been brought up - generation after generation - to follow what they were taught by their fathers and grandfathers.

They often don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, but they know if they just continue this, they will continue to get X number of bags of coffee every year. So I think if we have to have a change in the way coffee is grown, it has to come from the buyers. The planters are not going to change unless consumer behavior changes, if the buyer comes and says - I will not buy coffee where you are clear felling rainforests.

One good way to go about getting people to change is to show them that growing coffee is possible in a different way. It’s eminent that we’re going to see soil become extremely infertile not too far into the future, and that’s when I think the tables will turn. Where land that has been cared for in a healthy way will start giving more yield, than chemical farming that you see in agriculture now. Unfortunately I think we have to wait till that stage, where people … it’s money that drives them, and when money is not going to get them that much.

People are afraid of change, and they will only do it when they really have to.

So either it comes from the buyer, or in this more scary way - you totally mess up the ecosystem and your coffee gets affected and therefore you change.

Susanne K V
Artist (painter), organic farmer based in a semi-rural area of Kerala between the sea and the mountains, where they grow coconuts, bananas, mangoes, vegetables and cultivate rice; a part of the compound is a forest.
Susanne K V - Interview

I notice again and again that in the hustle and bustle of normal life, I forget to give importance to sound. And then again, and again, I remember, and I open my ears. And if I open them to music, or to the sounds outside - it's the same thing. Because it's the awareness of sound. Especially music for me, is a very important part - very much personally connected to movement. To the expression of the body, which is again, an expression of the mind. And it is also very much connected to the mental state. If I listen to music, it can change my mood. It can change my energy. It opens my chest (laughs) and with it, it opens my mind.

When I was 18 or 19, I had a job in Germany, and I went through a forested area and I saw the first dried up forest because of acid rain. When I saw that, I understood how the world is going and this is quite some decades ago, you know. So, if you would open your eyes early, you would have understood it early.

From that time onwards, I feel it, I observe it, I see it. And here regarding India, I came here first 35 years ago, and in the monsoon I was wearing sweaters because it was so cool.

And the rain was much more, not totally - but much more predictable than now because all the local people here have their old knowledge and say ‘oh, at that day, if it rains, it will rain for the next three weeks’ or something like that, but that doesn’t stick anymore.

This leads to a lot of confusion also in the maintenance of agriculture. So there's this idea that we have to plant the rice according to how it should be or how it always was, and some people do that - and others say it’s not possible anymore because the rain was late or too much. So the confusion is much bigger. To decide what to do according to the climate situation which is not reliable anymore, that is a big problem because there’s no alternative. And we who know all of this are a very, very small elite.

Educated people, people with some knowledge or insight, it's maybe 20% of the world population. And of this 20%, again, those who understand the complexity or the inter relations of the theme of climate change, again, a tiny percentage of these 20%. And it just makes me very hopeless. Because in that 20%, greed is so enormous and the greed seems to be the all invading and all overruling human desire which neglects all other considerations.

Susanna - Interview
Pranoy Thipaiah - Interview
Pranoy Thipaiah
Pranoy’s goal is to make people more mindful of the biodiversity in the Western Ghats through his work at Kerehaklu. He does this via a focus on the history of the interactions between indigenous and introduced species.

5:24pm, 29th September 2020
Under the 400 year old fig tree, Kerehaklu
Pranoy Thipaiah - Interview

K: Do you rely on listening? And if yes - how much and for what purpose?
P : Bees and pollination - is something that really dictates how a year can pan out so when coffee - arabica, is blossoming in March and April, if you don’t hear bees it’s a cause for concern. And also I find with my avocados - I don't know if it’s true but I have an inkling - there’s a certain sound that I can pick up on when the avocados on the tree are swaying with the wind and it’s alway a positive sign because I know there’s a big enough fruit on the tree brushing against a branch or a leaf.

And streams - streams I would say (we can hear one in the background)- are becoming more perennial than seasonal, we need water- everything can do with more water, and although the rains have become a bit more episodic, these streams seem to stick around for later parts of the year which is quite positive in a way.

K: Awesome, And in terms of the actual processing of the coffee - is there any part of the process where you rely on listening?
P: Yeah, it’s funny so when you’re looking at a process called - naturally processed coffee - or dry processed

- where the beans are drying within the fruit itself - You actually hold a bunch of cherries up and shake them, if there’s a gap between the cherry and the seed - you can actually hear them - so that’s a sign that the seed is ready - and then you take the moisture meter out.

K: Is coffee wasteful? The part of coffee that we consume is the first steep of the ground beans in hot water and that’s it. From an ecologically sustainable POV can it be seen as wasteful?
P: Yes, I think coffee is wasteful. Not just the brewing, but up until then - there are many processes each bean has to go past - like the skin or the cascara being separated from the bean, and then going back to like fertilizers etc. The amount of energy you use for that process is probably unsustainable to begin with. When it comes to brewing, grinding, then what you do with those coffee grounds - that for me I see as potential - particularly again in agriculture. One can also grow on coffee grounds - certain veggies, but also Oyster mushrooms. There’s a start up in Australia, that are going around different cafes and collecting their grounds to grow oyster mushrooms. Right now, maybe there can and should be a bit more effort put into the byproducts and such.