The 3-kilometre detour off the Barmer-Munabao Road is typical desert. The driver of the SUV that we have hired to reach a farmland in the middle of Rajasthan’s scorching Thar desert struggles to keep the tyres from veering off into the sand.
“When I ride my motorcycle, it gets stalled and I have to push it along,” says Chhoga Lal Soni, the 67-year-old owner of the farm.
Soni is accompanying me to his farm in Marudi village, 10 kilometres from the Barmer district headquarters. The vehicle screeches to a halt near an open well, which is, Soni tells me, 38 metres deep. The 28-hectare farmland abuts a hill on one side. There is a coconut tree at the entrance to Soni’s farm.
It was in 2001 that Soni, a former clerk at a district collector’s office, decided to develop a farm in the world’s ninth largest subtropical desert. And he knew it wouldn’t be plain sailing. But his hard work of more than a decade has borne fruit; today he has pomegranate, mango, jujube and Indian gooseberry trees.
In a terrain where growing even wheat, millet and mustard is difficult, Soni tried out fruits -- and has brilliantly succeeded.
“I was a lower-division clerk at the collector’s office for ten years, from 1971 to 1981, but gave it up over some differences with my seniors,” he tells me. “I took up the family business of gold trading but I wanted to do something out of the box and that’s when the idea of growing fruits in the desert struck me.”
Water: source of life
He dug an open well, took an electricity connection and dug 1-metre-deep trenches in rows and filled them with goat and sheep droppings. Soni brought 2,000 saplings from a nursery in Jodhpur and planted them on these filled trenches, but 1,100 of these wilted. In the next two years, he lost 1,000 saplings. Soni then figured out what the problem was: He had cleared the ground of dried leaves and mulch, which actually protected the soil from the extreme heat. He didn’t repeat the mistake.
Today, Soni’s farmland has 2,500 trees, including 1200 jujube, 175 Indian gooseberry, 125 pomegranate, 200 lemon, 50 blackberry and 50 guava trees.
Manaram Chaudhary, additional director, horticulture, Rajasthan Government, visited Soni’s farm in 2011 when he was posted in Jodhpur as additional director in agriculture department. “When I heard about this progressive cultivator, I lost no time in going there to see things for myself,” he says.
Chaudhary was so impressed with Soni’s labour that he had him join a group of 14 farmers on a professional ten-day study tour in January 2012 to the Centre for International Agricultural Development Corporation (CINADCO)’s training centre in Israel. The same year, Soni was declared the best farmer in Barmer district and received an award from then Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot.
“I feel so happy and satisfied when people like you come from far off to see my farmland,” Soni says with pride as we meander through gooseberry branches heavily laden with fruits. He looks for ochre, ripe jujubes for me. “Taste it,” he tells me. “You wouldn’t have eaten jujubes so sweet.”
Soni had no experience in agriculture. He learnt it by experiment. “When I grew mango in the desert, I thought if you really want to grow something, you can grow it, no matter what the climate is,” he says. There’s just one mango tree left in Soni’s farm. “There were 45,” he says, “most plants couldn’t withstand the extreme temperatures.” And, birds eat all the pomegranates.
Soni says he has spent about Rs2 million (Dh118,202) on his passion, but he started making profit only in 2012 when he sold jujubes and processed gooseberries into compote to sell it at Rs400 a kilogram. He wants to protect the mangoes and cover pomegranates — cover each fruit individually — to increase his income.
“That’s what makes his effort exceptional,” says Dr Pradeep Pagaria, in charge of Barmer’s Krishi Vigyan Kendra (agricultural science centre). “His goal is commercial production of fruits such as mango, pomegranate and sweet lime. He’s grown the seedless variety of lime, which is recommended for patients of stones. We taught him grafting, and provide technical support whenever he gets stuck.”
When Soni began this innovation in farming, irrigation was the biggest hurdle. “There was a time when I had to water each plant individually with earthen pitchers. I later took to drip irrigation, in which water falls directly at the root region, through pipes and tubes,” he says pointing to a network of plastic tubes in the farm.
Despite having three wells, Soni often finds that the water supply is inadequate. In 2005, the situation was so bad that the groundwater was completely pumped out after just 15 minutes from one well and after 45 minutes from the second well. He had to build shallow wells, fill them with water and use buckets to water the plants individually.
But in 2006, the area that had seen spells of drought for decades saw floods. Water rose in Soni’s wells. Plants flourished, and bore fruits.
He is against using chemicals to boost crop. “I use goat droppings, which unlike cow dung, doesn’t dissolve in water and gives nourishment to plants for a longer time,” Soni explains.
Unfortunately, his family, wife Deepti Devi and two sons and their wives, “don’t appreciate my efforts”, he rues. There was a time when his sons wanted him to sell the land off — they were offered Rs30 million for it (Soni says it is worth Rs200 million, especially because a ring road adjoining the farm has been proposed.)
Soni has also grown 20 custard apple trees, 100 natal plum trees and three trees of Elaeocarpus (rudraksh).
Now, Soni markets his gooseberry compote locally, promoting its medical benefits. Last year, he sold 600 boxes of a kilogram each. Fruiting season is from November to February, and this time, Soni plans to sell more.
It is mid-February and the gooseberry trees are still laden with fruits; ditto for jujubes. But Soni is more worried for the pomegranates and mangoes as he goes about picking lemons from the ground. “I offer the seedless lemon free of cost to patients of stones,” he says, claiming that it dissolves any kind of stone. There are many claims about the gooseberry compote, too, and he has kept a register for people who have benefited from it and written their testimonies.
The fruits of his labour are sweet indeed, Soni appears to think, as he surveys his oasis in the middle of this western Rajasthan desert.
Rakesh Kumar is a writer based in Jaipur, India.
