‘Farming is serious business, not all song and dance in waving wheat fields as in the movies’THE tall poplar trees whisper a little as a dark shadow silently streaks past them. A dog barks in the distant wilderness. And then there is complete silence. It’s 4 am, the sun is yet to peep over the horizon, but at the imposing Khiara homestead in Bassi Umar Khan village near Hoshiarpur, Punjab, the day has already begun. With a mug of steaming milk in hand, the prettily plump 50-year-old Harpreet Khiara strolls barefoot on the moist carpet of grass, her three dogs in tow. ‘‘The dew is great for the eyes, and charges me up for the day,’’ she says as she looks up at the inky sky now tinged with flecks of peach.

Khiara has a long day ahead of her, for today she and her fieldworkers plan to harvest maize, and this mistress of 84 acres will need to draw on all her reserves of energy to supervise a workforce of 200 labourers. Inside the house, her Olympic-size kitchen is all abuzz with half-a-dozen servants. ‘‘We’ve to prepare lunch for 100 men today,’’ grins the portly cook, fishing out a giant vessel from a mammoth pantry.

Hundreds of miles away, at Kamagiri village in Tamil Nadu, Ranjit Grewal is revving her four-wheel drive to take her first round of the day of her 54-acre flower field. She was woken up by a wireless — there are no phones here — from a neighbouring farmer, who warned her of a herd of elephants who had savaged his banana plantation the night before. But in spite of herself, the breathtaking beauty of the endless rows of gladioli and carnations, framed by the pink sky, makes her smile. Her manager gives her some good news: Thanks to the halogen lights skirting the farm, the pachyderms had given it a wide berth. But there is a slight problem: the water is down to a trickle. ‘‘I don’t think we’ll be able to save the birds of paradise,’’ sighs the former national golf champion.

‘Farming gives me an earthy wisdom no college can offer’Ruhi Nijjer can understand her distress, for in distant Nijjerpura village, on the outskirts of Amritsar, she is facing a shortage of both power and water. ‘‘In the past six years, ever since I started farming, we’ve never had to rely so heavily on gensets for running the motors as we do now,’’ fumes the 26-year-old MBA, who tills 200 acres of land growing potatoes, tomatoes, sweet peas and cauliflower.

But then, nature has a knack of springing surprises on these feminine farmers. ‘‘So does man,’’ laughs Sangeeta Deol of Dhanal Phoolpur village near Jalandhar, the master honey-harvester, reminding you that they are women farmers, not just ordinary ones.

Though the feisty tribe of down-to-earth women would like to pooh-pooh any gender bias, they admit their task is two-fold, for they fuse two responsibilities into one — that of hearth and land.

Take Vijaya Hiremath of Baramati. Besides pioneering sericulture in Maharashtra, the attractive 41-year-old also runs a flourishing dairy with 98 buffaloes who give 1,000 litres of milk a day. Vitthal Pawar, the farm manager, is all praise for the woman who took up farming only three years ago. ‘‘She never nags,’’ he says with tell-tale bias, ‘‘moreover, she is a great team worker, and tucks in her pallu to pick up the broom when required.’’

‘Working on land makes you generous and large-hearted ’Hiremath is equally committed to her mulberry gardens. Standing in the late afternoon sun near empty silkworm sheds, the perfectly turned out femme farmer cannot stop beaming. She has just recovered from the last mad day of cocoon harvesting when she came to farm at 7 am and left a back-breaking 24 hours later. ‘‘I started with just two acres of fallow land,’’ she says proudly. ‘‘After the first year’s success, my father-in-law (he owns 100 acres of cane land) gave me four. Now I have 10 acres of mulberry gardens.’’ Little wonder her daughter Chaitr, a final-year engineering student at a college in Pune, is so supportive of her endeavour.

So are the three NRI children of Harpreet — she owes her American ‘Yeah’ to them — who is credited with introducing turmeric to Punjab farmers. ‘‘It’s a great crop that grows in the shade of poplar trees, and fetches you a neat Rs 35,000 an acre,’’ she explains with the confidence of a savvy technologist, who learnt the ropes of farming only after her marriage to a landlord.

Similarly, Sangeeta Deol, who hums paeans to the virtues of bee-keeping and organic farming, took to the trade only to keep herself occupied after marriage. Today, many bee stings later, the president of the Bee Association of Jalandhar, which has 90 villages under it (she was also crowned Farmer of 1999), gifts pots of honey to those who visit her. And if you potter around her house a little, she will also offer you earthworms. She is on a self-appointed mission to promote organic fertiliser. Poking her stick at vermicompost pits, she says: ‘‘The soil treated with this fertiliser not only requires less water, it is also softer, and less prone to pests.’’

Farming is no child’s play, they chorus. ‘‘It’s a serious business, not all song and dance in waving wheat fields as you see in the movies,’’ says Ruhi, who took over the reins from her father J S Nijjer, a reputed seed farmer, six years ago.

Visit her in February, and you will see rows of trucks dotting the fields. ‘‘It’s a tough job. We start loading our bags of potato seed at 8 am and continue till late into the night.’’ Before this, the seeds are graded, and then put in separate sacks. ‘‘Different areas require different variety of seeds,’’ explains Ruhi, who markets her seeds in West Bengal, Gujarat and Karnataka. In summer, it is the turn of tomatoes, which are packed off to Ahmedabad.

‘I started with two acres of fallow land and hit pay dirt in the first year’Supervision, say these femme farmers, is a must. ‘‘Labourers don’t work if you don’t keep a close eye on them,’’ says Ranjit Grewal, who moved from Ludhiana, where her husband Gurlal is an industrialist, to Bangalore to manage the farming and marketing operations of her flower business. ‘‘Also, I had to teach them everything,’’ she says. Ranjit is now experimenting with Aussie blooms such as kangaroo’s paw and banksia. ‘‘We’ve also introduced wax flowers from Israel,’’ says the keen golfer, who keeps a strict vigil on profits as well.

‘‘We don’t earn a regular monthly income,’’ explains Harpreet, ‘‘so we have to rationalise our spending according to the returns after the harvest.’’ But most confess to being rather liberal with their money. ‘‘The land makes you bighearted,’’ says Ranjit.

The difference in scale is there for all to see. So, the tumbler of lassi — water is scarce — that Harpreet offers you makes your city glass look like a thimble. ‘‘You can’t beat our desi ghee either,’’ she laughs, urging you to try a spoonful of it neat. Be it pickles, honey, milk or even plain butter, they are stored in mega-containers designed to whet the greediest of appetites.

‘‘It’s partly because we grow most of the produce ourselves,’’ explains Ruhi. The wheat and maize come from the farm, vegetables from the small patch near the house, and milk from the personal dairies most of them maintain. Harpreet has four cows while Ruhi has a dozen. The milk is purely for personal consumption. Even the dogs turn up their noses when water is offered to them. But the pooches can afford to be snooty, for they are the watchdogs the families rely on for security. ‘‘Even though we are on the National Highway,’’ say the Nijjers, ‘‘and the police post is just half a kilometre way, the two huskies (Bacardi and Soda) do make us feel secure,’’ says Ruhi.

Harpreet, whose farmstead is more than a kilometre away from the village, however, takes heart from the two guns she and her husband own. ‘‘My three dogs are always there and so are five-odd servants, but you can’t take any chances,’’ she rationalises.

Vehicles too are kept well-oiled. ‘‘You never know when there is an emergency,’’ says Ruhi. Last year, one of her servants fell ill at night and had to be rushed to Amritsar. Harpreet, who has suffered a slipped disc, admits that sometimes the isolation she cherishes so much does worry her. But with the city creeping into the countryside, medical care is just a call away. So are the other pleasures. ‘‘My children got the best of both worlds — they studied in the city without missing out on the bounties of the countryside,’’ says Sangeeta Deol. Ruhi, who has studied in Chandigarh, says she has never missed city life. ‘‘Besides, I do take an annual break,’’ she smiles.

For Doris Randhawa, the bright lights of the city pale before the bounties of nature at her farm. The daughter-in-law of the illustrious Dr M S Randhawa, an ICS officer who was Delhi’s Deputy Commissioner at the time of Partition, this lady from Stuttgart in Germany took up farming at Kharar in Punjab after her husband’s death in 1988. Doris farms for peace of mind. ‘‘I feel this constant interaction with nature refreshes the soul,’’ she smiles. ‘‘Farming gives one the freedom to think and grow besides providing strength and earthy wisdom which no college can offer,’’ she says, almost lyrical in praise of her green acres.