Every farm has an origin. This is ours — recorded not in memory, which fades, but in a video and these words, so that years from now we can look back and measure how far the land has travelled.
When we began in 2026, Poorti Farm was not a farm at all. It was 22 acres of tired, open ground in Challakere Taluk, on the Deccan plateau of Karnataka — land that had lain bare for years, without cultivation, without care. The kind of land people drive past without a second glance.
The eastern part, where you enter the farm, is flat and hard. For many years it served the village as a cricket pitch, packed down by countless matches. In the satellite record from 2020 onward, it shows up as a pale, uncultivated rectangle with only sporadic wild growth breaking the surface. In our early footage, taken before the rains, it looks like something close to a desert.
Move toward the centre and the ground rises into a small hillock, with an elevated flat stretch beneath it, the two divided by a trench. Here too the history is one of neglect — no crops, only scattered scrub. What best belongs on that hillock is a question we are still sitting with.
The western end is the hardest chapter. It is the most broken terrain on the property, undulating and scarred, where no agriculture has ever taken place. In the past it was quarried by people with no stake in its future, and it shows: stones, ditches, and bare earth. Set beside the neighbouring farms in the satellite images, its story tells itself. And yet, at its lowest point, a natural depression has formed over the years where rainwater gathers — a flaw that may quietly become a gift, perhaps one day our pond.
To the south sits the highland — the "captain's cabin" of this ship-shaped piece of land, with its distinctive southern bulge. A portion here was farmed once, though you would not guess it: the previous owner levelled it with a JCB before selling, erasing the little cultivation history it had.
This is a difficult place to attempt a food forest. Challakere falls within the Central Dry agro-climatic zone of Karnataka and is officially classified as drought-prone. Rainfall is scarce, the soil is thin red laterite over hardpan, and water is not a resource here so much as a responsibility. Is a food forest on such land too ambitious? We honestly do not know yet.
But we have already begun. We are planting into hard ground with open eyes, treating every drop of water as capital rather than something to spend. Whatever else it becomes, this land is going to teach us — about soil, about patience, and perhaps most of all about water.
This is where we started. Thank you for walking the first steps of the journey with us.
