It’s a cheerful field, glistening with myriad shades of green, at Chaina village in Faridkot district of Punjab. Emerald shoots of wheat cohabit happily with petite fenugreek and wispy black gram plants amid raised beds with potatoes in their depths. While the skilful intercropping is impressive, the real USP of Charanjit Singh Punni’s five acres is its chemical-free status. “I haven’t sprinkled even a fistful of urea or pesticide in my fields,” beams the articulate man, part of the growing tribe of farmers in Punjab which has sworn off chemicals.

Punni grows black gram to fix nitrogen in the soil, does dense inter-cropping to rule out weeds, practises mulching to regulate soil temperature, uses a concoction prepared from cow dung, jaggery and gram flour, to activate earthworms and uses pesticides made at home with ingredients available in the kitchen, the cowshed or in the fields.

Call it a backlash against the overdose of pesticides or the creeping awareness about its fallouts, but it’s back to the nature for Punjab farmers. The state, which has 1.5 per cent of farmland in India but consumes 20 per cent of pesticide, is slowly beginning to eschew chemicals under the aegis of the Kheti Virasat Mission (KVM), a non-profit civil society action group, registered as a trust in March 2005 with head office at Jaitu town of Faridkot.

“This holistic model of farming is the only way out for these debt-ridden farmers, for it minimises the cost of their inputs and maximises output,” says Umendra Dutt, the brain behind this movement, which boasts 800 members, 90 per cent of them farmers and a host of medical practitioners.

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