Making Jeevamrit at Poorti Farm

In a natural farm there are no bags of urea or DAP to fall back on. Soil fertility has to be built slowly, by the life living in the soil itself. One of the simplest tools for encouraging that life is Jeevamrit, a fermented preparation made from the dung and urine of desi cows. This month we made our first batch.

Why Jeevamrit?

Jeevamrit (जीवामृत, "the nectar of life") is a core practice of Subhash Palekar Natural Farming. It is easy to misunderstand it as a fertiliser. It isn't one. The quantities of nitrogen, phosphorus or potassium in a drum of Jeevamrit are small.

What it does carry is a huge population of beneficial microbes. The fresh dung of a desi cow is rich in them, and during fermentation the jaggery feeds them and they multiply. When Jeevamrit reaches the soil, these microbes help break down organic matter, make locked nutrients available to plant roots, and draw earthworms and other soil life back into activity.

For degraded land like ours, with thin red laterite, years without cultivation, and very little organic matter, bringing the soil back to life matters more than anything else. Jeevamrit is a small, inexpensive way to push it in that direction, made entirely from what is available on a farm.

How We Made It

These are the ingredients we used for our batch:

• Water: 200 litres

• Desi cow dung (gobar): 10 kg, fresh

• Desi cow urine (gaumutra): 10 litres

• Chickpea flour (besan): 2 kg

• Jaggery: 10 kg

• A handful of living soil, taken from undisturbed ground rich in microbes

The method is simple:

1. Fill a drum with the water and keep it in the shade.

2. Add the dung and urine and mix thoroughly by hand or with a stick.

3. Dissolve the jaggery and chickpea flour and add them. The jaggery feeds the microbes, and the pulse flour gives them protein.

4. Add the handful of soil, which seeds the mix with local microbes already adapted to our land.

5. Cover the drum with a jute sack so it can breathe, and stir clockwise for a minute or two every morning and evening.

Within a couple of days the mix begins to ferment. It bubbles and takes on a strong, earthy smell, which is the sign that the microbes are active.

Our Timeline

We prepared this batch on 4 September 2026. It was meant for our groundnut crop, which we are growing experimentally the organic way (you can read The Groundnut Story in our Field Notes). We applied it on 19 September 2026, about seven weeks after sowing, as the crop moves into the stage where it begins pegging and forming pods underground. That's when healthy root-zone activity counts most.

This was our first batch, and like everything else on this land, it's an experiment. We'll be watching the crop closely, and we'll share what we see in coming field notes: how the plants respond, and whether we notice any change in the soil.

Thanks for reading and Good Day.