NatuEco Farming - Philosophy

Natueco is for those who firmly believe in living a life of abundance, fearlessness, love and above all non aggressiveness. Having said that, Natueco is paradoxically also about maximizing output with minimum input in energy terms. Its goal is to maximize carbon or biomass and not necessarily maximize economic gain in the narrow sense.

In an age where farming is considered as a source of income, Natueco brings home the point that such activity needs to be holistic and stem from a larger vision. Mere learning and practicing a few skills can never be a substitute for this larger understanding and vision for life. In this context, Natueco farming and its practice requires one to draw connections of their life with this culture and live in sync with the other elements in their immediate environment. The loving nurturance provided to the plants in a natural environment creates positive energy and healthy environment. For instance, healthy soil with balanced composition of elements and microbes improves not only the health of the plant but also transcends into the life of people interacting with this environment. Thus, it is not just a science but also a culture, such that it can be understood in any local context without any barriers of language, conventional education, region, and the like.

What is Primary Productivity and why should we care to improve it?

This is a hypothesis that Natueco Farming has a strong correlation with how we use energy and water as a resource rather than how we do farming. We believe that the present day conventional farming may be productive and high yielding in the short run but in terms of water and energy use, it is highly inefficient and it is this inefficiency that is the root cause of all problems associated with farming in the long run.

Primary Productivity

We define productivity of a farm (called 'Visible Productivity') as drymass/ per hectare which is a combined effect of 'Primary Productivity' and 'Secondary Productivity'.' Primary Productivity' by definition is the productive efficiency of land without any external input while 'Secondary Productivity' is defined as the incremental productivity achieved over and above the primary because of external inputs like water(brought in from outside), fertilizers, pesticides, transportation etc. Secondary therefore is a multiplier of the primary.

How do we measure Primary Productivity?

'Primary Productivity' is measured in terms of output efficiency (dry mass/ per hectare/KL of water consumed) while 'Visible Productivity' is measured in terms of gross output.(dry mass/per hectare). Hence it is very much possible that while 'Visible Productivity' seems to be going up, the underlying 'Primary Productivity' is going down sharply.

What is wrong in the existing system?

So far all our efforts have been to increase the 'Visible Productivity' by enhancing the 'Secondary Productivity' which in itself is perfectly sensible thing to do. We have so far got phenomenal results indeed. In fact the so called 'Green Revolution' has been all about increasing our 'Visible Productivity' through enhancing 'Secondary Productivity'. Example of Punjab is the most glaring case of what we are talking. The enhanced 'Secondary Productivity' has given us a false sense of pride that 'Visible Productivity' is up. However, the reality was that the 'Primary Productivity' had been steadily going down all these years and we were unaware because our focus was just measuring the 'Visible Productivity'.

In the beginning the total 'Visible Productivity' can be easily increased by external inputs and all seems to be going good. However, over time an effort to increase 'Secondary Productivity' impairs our farm's 'Primary Productivity' and we start seeing a decline in the 'Visible Productivity' even though external inputs are the same.