The weekend kicked off with an overnight bus ride to Kadiri, Anantapur, AP which is the largest town in the district. This trip was my first trip for work to visit the Talupula plantation. So bus ride wasn't the greatest since the seats weren't the most comfortable. My "chaperone" granted he is my junior and I almost missed our stop in Kadiri. Our kind host stopped the bus and inquired if we were onboard that we should be woken up. We could have woken up 100km south of Kadiri and been in a bind. Talupula is about an hour from Kadiri. Village in India looks like the city but without high rises, buses and lack of some modern amenities. Our host is the founder of Green Tree Foundation http://permaculturenews.org/2013/11/18/gangi-setty-and-the-green-tree-foundation-project-india/.
This trip enabled me to see first hand what impact SankalpTaru's work has and what their work is. Having been in India for 2 months I still struggled with truly understanding what ST is and does. This was the perfect opportunity to see for myself. Gangi Setty is very passionate about the work he does and showed me not just the plantations he is working on for the Borges campaign but his own personal projects. The three plantations we visited that are ST beneficiaries each had similar stories. Talupula's main source of income is labor and groundnut cash crop. Due to drought and varied rainfall this is not very sustainable for villagers. The beneficiaries believe in the project, working very hard and patiently awaiting a return that won't be realized for 4 years as the trees mature. '
Gangi Setty is a prinmary school teacher and the founder of The Green Tree Foundation. He plants trees in Talupula and a SankalpTaru Partner in Talupla. The partnership is a friendship striving to change the lives of farmers. "Local activity = a global solution." The Green Tree Foundation is a social NGO and Gangi Setty is a botanist by training. The foundation has a spiritual connection because as a child Gangi Setty saw the affects of droughts and infrequent rainfall. His classmates dropped out of school to work on farms. He would like to see a dam built in the future for water retention.
Gangi Setty's other projects include organic farming, vermicomposting and many more. He has a vision to use neem trees and other quick growing trees as a bio fence instead of using metal or wood fences. He sees it as why give money to the corporations by purchasing metal fences. Neem trees say 100 trees per acre and shrubs that grow to about waist level will be sufficient in deterring animals from feasting on crops. Bio fencing would also act as a wind breaker in the rocky. arid region. Side note thanks to Growing Power in Wisconsin, I learned about vermi composting and now I have seen it at work in Talupula. Vermi composting is another way to grow crops free of pesticide by using worms to nourish the soil. We visited one farmer who had two troughs of vermicompost that he adds cow dung to and makes panchagavya which is a natural fertilizer.
The trip ended with a visit to the largest Banyan Tree according to the '86 Guinness World Records. The tree is over 6 centuries old and spreads across 6 acres. It is not protected by AP forestry.
