IMT: A Forested Factory

---

I tossed a fist full of rupees at the cab driver, heaved my twenty kilo pack onto my back and jumped out of the tuk tuk. My feet hit the ground before we rolled to a stop. I plunged into the chaos of the Bangalore bush station, past families laden with clothes to carry home to the village and foreign travelers struggling to make sense of the melee. I rushed past the guards checking bags at the front, pretending that I did not understand the meaning of their raised fists and protesting voices. I asked the woman under the “office” sign where to find bus station number 53 to Chikamaglur. She waves vaguely to my right. I peer up at the board listing destinations and their stop numbers. My destination is unsurprisingly absent. I run in the vague direction of her pointed hand. Above the buses are big black numbers. Number 53 again is conspicuously absent. I ask a tote selling bottled water and he points me to the left. I take off at a run in that direction. I now had less than twenty minutes to buy my ticket and find my bus. My arms flail and legs burn as I sprint through the crowd. I feel like a crazy American chimpanzee with blond hair.

I reach the opposite end of the bus station. Number 53 does not appear. I finally find a bus ticket taker and ask him where I can find the bus to Chikmaglur. His head does the slight head bobble that sometimes means yes, sometimes means ok, sometimes means I have no idea, and sometimes means buzz off. I ask the next ticket taker and he points me toward the other end. I take off again at a run, sweat pouring down my face due to the rainy season humidity. Thanking Lord Ganesh, remover of obstacles, for the lack of mid-morning sun, I run back to the entry way of the bus station, ask for directions and receive another head bobble. I glance about to see if number 53 magically appeared. Again there is no bus to Chikmaglur. I feel the beginning edges of panic creep into my stomach. The bus leaves in 15 minutes. Due to a weekend holiday, this is the last bus for two days. If I fail to find the stop, I will miss the only field visit I’d managed to coordinate for my two-month stay in India. I run back to the other end of the bus station, burning another five minutes. My pulse is now racing faster and faster with every second. I run back again. Every few steps I ask a different person who points me in a different variation of left or right.

Finally, with five minutes remaining before departure, I find a ticket taker who knows where to find the bus to Chikmaglur. Magically, he lifts my pack from my arms, places it in the back of the bus and whisks me into a front row aisle seat. Sweating, I breathe a sigh of relief and a laugh escapes my mouth. Even in month 11, the chaotic frenzy of travel in a new country where I don’t understand the body or spoken language and the puzzle pieces of the system keep shifting under my feet continues to send adrenaline pumping through my veins. I smile with at the sweetness of another travel disaster averted.

Driving South from Bangalore, India’s bustling tech capital, feels like traveling back to a forgotten era. The smog from the unending traffic jams produced by 14 million people that assaults each breath in the city evaporates into the sweet air of farm land. With each mile the potholes pop the bus into the air and a red dust cloud replaces the smog. The high rises built by thousands of calloused hands lining the brand new eight lane highway give way to mud huts and rice patties. The chaos of the city slips into the monotony of rural life. I look out the window. Bright colored saris burst through the unending green as women sow the seeds of the next harvest.

On the bus, a well-soled woman sits in the seat next to me. Her plain beige salwarkameez, the traditional tunic and flowing pant of India, is composed of light, soft cotton. She peers at me out of the side of her eye. As soon as I am propelled into the air by another pothole, bounced awake from my short nap, she introduces herself as Suneetha. She asks what brings me to Chikamglur and I tell her that I’m studying sustainable coffee production. Her face brightens at my purpose and she launches into her story. Her family owns a farm around Chikmaglur, though she now lives in Bangalore with her niece and mother where she works as an attorney. Her father was a prominent estate owner and was the well-respected head of the planter council for the Coffee Board. The farm was his passion and he tended to it like a child, using his nursery to develop novel coffee varieties perfectly suited to the Chikmaglur climate. Since he passed away, Suneetha and her sister have been caring for the farm. She explains, “Things are no longer the same as when my father was alive. The planters struggle greatly to survive. Prices are low and fertilizer costs are high.” When her father built a prosperous farm from virgin land, workers flooded the farms in search of the dollar a day wages, living quarters, schools and health services for their children. Now they struggle to find a sufficient number of workers as farm laborers migrate to the city in search of 5 dollar a day construction jobs.

I ask her if gender is a problem for her and her sister. “Do the male farmers try to drive you out?” I ask. She looks to the ground, avoiding my question but then she looks my in the eye; “Of course,” she says. The reality of the labor shortage compounds their struggle to run a profitable farm. As the only female owners in the area, their neighbors poach their labor and the workers they do have refuse to work more than half a day. With the wealth her father earned from coffee, her family bought a house in Bangalore and her niece attends private school there. Her sister still lives on the farm tending to the land in honor of their father’s legacy. Every day they are tempted to quit, leave the daily struggle with the land, labor and community for the relatively simple life of the city. She invites me to visit if I have time during my short stay in Chikamaglur.

We arrive as another monsoon begins to rain down. I hop out of the bus, rush to the back and just catch my bag before it is thrown onto the wet, red ground. Quickly, an umbrella pops over my head. It is Dr. Suneel, my host. I breathe a sigh of relief.

Chikmaglur is an agricultural center built by the coffee trade. Fertilizer shops and trading offices fill the most prominent office spaces. The town grew up around coffee. Planters profited from the subsidized fertilizer costs and prices propped up by the international market, investing in motels, grocery stores and schools. The lure of work in the fields attracted large families from across the region, creating a medium sized town full of modern accoutrements.

As we drive south from the town to our first estate, an amalgam of coffee plants and towering jungle trees line the road, insuring a cool breeze cuts the morning humidity. Hidden from the road, tucked into a corner of the farm, sits a two-story house made of stone. Three by two foot pictures of every farm patriarch hang from the pink walls of the house. Rows of one story stone white buildings with eight small square rooms line up slightly out of view of the windows of the manor. They are the workers’ quarters. I feel like I am on a southern cotton plantation where the wealth of the owners is supported by a steady stream of cheap labor. The only sign of modernity is the television satellite perched on top of the roof.

Mr. Abhijcef Pai now cares for his family farm. He is a college educated thirty-something, married with two kids. He pulls on his galoshes and hops into the cab of our jeep to take us on a tour of the farm. Our first stop is a white barn where he proudly shows off his herd of manure producing cows and the smelly compost heap that turns their precious by-product into an organic, nutrient rich fertilizer. As the jeep continues down the narrow roads of the farm, he hops out into the mud with the ease of a man who knows his land intimately. He takes great care to show Dr. Suneel the outbreak of white stem bora that threatens next year’s profits. He is worried that the disease flourishes on the farm next door due to his neighbor’s neglect and will travel to his fields despite his best efforts to control it. Dr. Suneel launches into an explanation on tracing and potential barriers he could put between the two estates. Mr. Abijcef bobbles his head in seeming agreement.

Despite his evident love and intimate knowledge of his farm, this is Mr. Abijcef’s tertiary avocation. He lives and owns a business in Bangalore with his family. In Chikmaglur he owns two hotels, both which he inherited from his fathers. The farm only garners his attentions on weekends and holidays.

With one foot in the cities and business of modern India and the other back on the plantation, this farm and its farmer exemplify the state of the modern Indian coffee industry. For decades, the Coffee Board of India purchased all the coffee produced in country and marketed it to the international community. This centralized market both depressed and stabilized local markets providing farmers with a secure base from which to build their fortunes. In the late nineties, India deregulated their market, allowing a free market system to arise. Similar to the rest of the coffee farming countries, the new decentralized system exposed the farmers to a greater amount of risk than during the previous era.

The current Chairman of the Board, G.V. Krishna Rau, is a career bureaucrat who admits that he knew little about coffee when he accepted the position. Several years into his tenure he voices strong opinions about the malaise that has come over the industry. According to Chairman Rau, the industry has slowly adjusted to the recent privatization because “We have not had to compete, so farmers never had to (innovate) to survive.” During the years of government control, the farming community turned to the Coffee Board for direction in research, marketing and lobbying for fertilizer subsidies. Even as farmers have embraced the local free market, selling their coffee to the middleman with the highest price, they have resisted greater innovation. Instead of organizing groups to market their coffee internationally or band together to combat the white stem bora, according to both chairman Rau and the head of the Indian research institute, farmers continue to turn to the Coffee Board to provide the solution to their problems.

When I met the treasurer of the Karnataka Planters Association, a farmer with political ambitions, I asked him what he saw as the solution to the woes of the farmers. He voiced the need for greater subsidies from the government and for the Coffee Board to lobby the government on behalf of the farmers. The government run Coffee Research Center needs to focus their research on how to combat the white stem bora, he emphasized, and help the farmers solve the labor problem. Beyond domestic problems, they need to improve the marketing of Indian coffee not only internationally but nationally as well. He looked at me and asked, “Where are the Coffee Board Coffee Houses,” to stress the failure of the Coffee Board.

Unlike the rest of India, where the pulse of economic innovation beats at a fevered pace, the planters I interviewed felt like they were living in centuries past. While individual farmers have built national coffee chains or developed international coffee markets, the majority of farmers market their coffee like they have for hundreds of years, to the local buyer whether it is the Coffee Board or the local middle man. Unlike Central America or East Africa where there are multiple farmer organizations, India remains relatively unorganized. After corruption felled the first cooperatives, the farmers stopped fighting to organize and increase their market share. While there are sparks of innovation, look no farther than the Café Coffee day cafes that populate Indian cities, the traditional planting community appears to fight being weaned off the stabilizing influence of the Coffee Board.

Dr. Suneel fights for innovation among the planter class. He travels across the farms surrounding Chikmaglur, peddling the complete nutrition program offered by his company and my host, IMT Technologies. He seeks to add a touch of science to the ancient art of Indian coffee farming. By combining the lush canopy with organic matter and then the 16 different nutrients offered by IMT fertilizers, farmers can transform their coffee plants from unproductive and disease-ridden to full of large green leaves hiding bunches of 12 cherries up and down the branches. Where other companies offer different combinations of Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium, Dr. Suneel produces products filled with Silver, Gold and other nutrients. He explains, “Like a human, plants need complete nutrition— a balanced diet.” This provides a plant with the diet it requires for optimum health and production. Despite the verifiable efficacy of his products, he fights an uphill battle as farmers accustomed to maintaining their farms with relatively little investment, resist the increased effort and cost of his program. They cite the high cost of farming and a mounting labor crisis as insurmountable obstacles to the success of the program. The innovation shy farmers are slow to warm to this new system even though, in the long term, it would increase their yields and profitability.

Beyond their clashes with a modernizing India, the Indian farmers’ affinity for their traditional system preserves one of the most biodiverse farming systems in the world. Nestled in the corner of a biodiversity hotspot, their farms resemble well-managed forests, where coffee trees line the jungle floor. Around 100 years ago, the ancestors of India’s modern day planter class carved up the forests into farms by planting neat rows of coffee underneath the lush jungle canopy. Some were owned by British colonialists, who sold them to their farm managers upon leaving the newly freed country. Others were carved out by Indians fleeing the Moghul wars of the North. These farms are a familial legacy, remaining within the same bloodline since the nutrients stored in the forest floor were first channeled towards coffee production. Due to the ample supply of man power, the farmers found it most efficient to leave the jungle trees as a diverse shade cover for their coffee plants. The monsoon schedule and hilly nature of the landscape required the leaves of shade trees to protect the coffee cherries and the tree roots to hold the soil still. This lush landscape still attracts elephant families, who routinely rampage through farms, leaving a path of destroyed coffee plants as a parting gift for farmers.
During the years of Coffee Board rule, the planters thrived due to stable prices and cheap labor. They built huge plantation style homes, constructed from rosewood beams and expensive quarried stone. Farmers still live in these homes, proudly exhibiting their wealth and tradition.

Fueling this environmental and economic prosperity was the unending supply of cheap, skilled labor. Similar to the planter class, generations of workers passed down their trade as shade loppers, weeders and coffee pickers. While the workers earning a dollar or less a day may not have been able to accumulate wealth and rise out of the working class, life on the farm provided their families with the minimum necessary for a good quality of life. Families lived on the farm in the simple yet clean quarters of white walls and tiled roofs constructed by the planters in accordance with Indian law. Their children attended school on the farm and they had access to basic health clinics. Clean water flowed from pumps across the coffee fields. With prices stabilized due to the coffee Board, fertilizer subsidized and labor plentiful and cheap, the planter class earned a relatively easy wealth, which protected the diversity of their farms and negated the need to innovate. As India began to modernize, currents of change threatened this inherently sustainable system.

Prosperous planters sent their children to university, bought modern cars and built houses in the city. From these years of prosperity emerged a generation of educated planters with a diverse set of interests, ranging from computers to hotels to law. For the majority, coffee became a means to an ends. Caught up in the lure of modern life, their coffee farms funded the city lifestyle this new generation prefers. In part because the farm was self-maintaining, they took their coffee profits and invested in their other business ventures. Many planters no longer live on the farm, but rather in the cities where they own business or pursue a professional career. As the center of life moves away from the farm and the labor shortage increases the difficulty of managing a farm from afar, many children of farmers choose to sell their portion of the farm rather than invest in the fertilizer and labor necessary to maintain productive land.

Where the farm remains in the family, the older generation tends to it, waiting with bated breath for the next generation to return. In Chikmaglur, Mrs. Satyaprema Manjunath floats around her beautiful split level home alone; her son sends her grandson to visit on the weekend. Her son shows no interest, but my grandson,” she tells me, “loves the farm.” In Tamil Nadu, Mr. Kannapan invests in erosion control. Faithful that his grown son, away studying computers, will mature and return to the farm. Even I can hear the doubt in his voice.
The problems of modern farming combined with the wanderlust of the current generation throw the survival of the traditional coffee farm into even greater doubt. Outside Hassan, Mr. Bellur Vinay left a lucrative job managing hotels to care for his ailing father. He looks me in the eye and describes how every day he fights to keep his farm profitable. He fights the workers who consistently want more money for less work. He fights the diseases which have descended on his farm because he can not find enough workers. He fights against the rising costs as fertilizer and agrochemical prices increase every year. His voice is pained, expression taut. In a few years, he predicts he will move to the city with his family. His father, sitting in the corner of their living room agrees. “It isn’t like it was. So many problems.” Longing fills Bellur’s face and I can see him welcoming tourists to his hotel on the beaches of Mysore.

After listening to the withering future of the family coffee farm in India described in such stark terms, I began to wonder if modern farming with a traditional, biodiverse twist was even possible. Wandering the hills of Yercaurd, however, I found the modern model in practice. The owner is an extremely generous planter with an American MBA. Rather than accept a high level job in the American financial industry, he traveled to Israel to learn their water management tactics. When he returned to India, he made a 100,000 dollar investment in the infrastructure of his plantation. He increased the diversity of the canopy, put in stone walls to prevent erosion and waterways to direct runoff to a pond for irrigation. He modernized his factory while introducing foreign coffee experts to the winding hills of his farm. Unlike other farmers who directed their coffee wealth to other business ventures, he looked at his farm as a source of future wealth and prosperity. As a business man he knew he had to spend money to make money. As a father and environmentalist, he sees the natural beauty of his farm as a gift to his children and an investment in their continued health and prosperity.

The shifting culture of the next generation of estate owners and coffee crisis that accompanied privatization have whittled away the diversity of the farms. As coffee becomes less economically viable, many planters who remain on the farm stop maintaining the diversity of their shade. According to Indian law a farmer may own his land but does not own the jungle trees growing on their farm. As a result, the farmers can not legally cut the jungle trees down and sell them on the local market. To comply with the law, instead, they harvest the jungle trees when they fall and sell them for a depressed price at the government auction. As farmers diversify away from coffee to a less labor intensive crop, they replace their jungle trees with Silver Oak. Imported from Australia, this tree grows quickly, requires almost no care and can be sold for a hefty profit. As each jungle tree falls, the farmers replace them with the non-indigenous, Silver Oak gradually eroding the famed diversity of Indian coffee farms.

The creeping invasion of Silver Oak receives ground support from the labor shortage plaguing the coffee lands. Traditional shade requires specialized maintenance to lop the branches once a year, allowing the post-monsoon sun to penetrate and ripen the cherries. The men who control coffee shade come from a proud tradition much like the planters, which has been passed down from father to son. These skilled men scamper up the 100 foot tall trees deftly cutting down a few branches, allowing just the right amount of sun to penetrate while leaving enough branches to regenerate the lush canopy before the next monsoon. Lured by 5 dollars a day for construction work in Indian cities, the sons of shade loppers are asking for higher and higher wages and leaving the farm if they view they are not compensated fairly. Due to the palm tree like tops of Silver Oak, these trees require almost no shade lopping to insure the right amount of sun seeps down to the coffee plants below, minimizing the experienced, skilled labor required on the farm.

While this fast growing tree shades the coffee, Silver Oak sheds stiff, spindly leaves that carpet the ground rather than decomposing quickly into the rich soil. Where the luxuriant green leaves of the jungle trees fertilize the ground, replacing the nutrients lost to the harvest, Silver Oak gorges on the soil nutrients. As a result, the rich soil of the coffee farms gradually disappears with each harvest and yields follow closely behind.

Beyond the invasion of Silver Oak, other farmer solutions to diminishing profits speed the disappearance of the traditionally diverse coffee farm. One man who returned from a prosperous job as a bookkeeper to care for his farm cut down the jungle shade and uprooted Arabica trees to plant Silver Oak and Robusta. He said he knew he was harming the land by removing the jungle trees, but he simply could not hire enough labor to maintain the canopy. The increased output from Robusta, he believes, along with the profits from Silver Oak will enable him to remain solvent despite consistently increasing costs.

These changes in the ecosystem of each farm contributes to increasing levels of disease throughout the growing region. Routinely I met farmers who lost 40 to 60 percent of their coffee trees to the white stem or berry bora. Idle farms allow these bugs to propagate, spreading to the productive fields sitting at their border. Due to the labor shortage, even diligent farmers struggle to spray chemical controls in a timely manner while fertilizer application is delayed alongside all farm activity. The delay weakens both the effectiveness of the chemical controls and the inherent well-being of the plant which would enable them to fight off diseases.

The combination of disease, a generational shift away from farming, increasing costs, arboreal alterations and a decreasing labor pool threatens the lush rolling hills of Indian coffee. Where the sun farms of Kenya or Brazil are no better than any other type of chemical monoculture in terms of their impact on the well-being of the people and environment, the farms of India play a vital role in preserving the ecosystem of Karnataka, Coorg and the coffee areas of Tamil Nadu. They trap water in the soil, require the continued existence of wild forest patches and support a diverse array of species.

Dr. Suneel is on the frontlines, waging the war against the gradual decline of the traditional Indian coffee farm. Every time we hear the tale of disease or see a coffee farm solely shaded by Silver Oak, Dr. Suneel shakes his head and decries the uphill battle to get farmers to invest in their estates. Despite rising costs and a labor force that now lives in the cities, he believes that coffee remains a profitable business in India. He insists that the farmers must simply innovate, adopt a scientifically designed plant diet and business like bookkeeping. He holds up Dr. Gerard D’Souja as an example of the truth in his statement. Dr. D’Souja is a business management professor in Bangalore. He applies management practices to his farm to attract more labor and inspire loyalty, creating incentives for better performance and constructing a recreation room for workers to gather and watch television on the weekends He does not face a labor shortage despite not having raised his daily wages over the last year. Like Dr. Suneel, he believes that farmers simply do not have the business acumen to accurately understand how profitable a business coffee farming can be. Moreover, he thinks the current situation is a product of planter laziness, rather than a true labor shortage or rising costs cutting profits. “They had it so good for so long that they refuse to add additional investment into their farm or provide additional services for their workers to keep them on their farm,” he points out, “How can you have a labor shortage in the second most populous country in the world?”

Where other farms have spindly branches and starved soil, Dr. D’Souja’s trees are full of leaves, cherries and sit beneath a lush and diverse canopy. To IMT, the diversity of the canopy is an essential component of a well-functioning and nourished plant system as the trees recycle the nutrients back into the soil. Dr. Suneel walks the farm with a confident swagger. This farm is a product of his consultation and proof that with innovation and dedication an Indian coffee farmer can create a profitable farm.

Perhaps more than the feasibility of farming in India, the question is whether the planters are willing to adopt the changes required to farm profitably in the modern era. To survive they must innovate and invest in their farm while maintaining the traditional canopy that is key to their historical and future success. They must look at farming as a profession and apply their education and knowledge accordingly. The environmental and economic well-being of this southern region depends on the farmer’s ability to adapt.

---