Land: Along with six of our friends, we bought 10 acres of farm land in Madhvarayapuram. How we met with that land is a story by itself :)

Affinity: While we were growing up in India, Nisha and I had vegetable garden in our backyard. In the US too, we did the same for a couple of years. It is not much but these experiences along with spending summers in villages where our relatives lived (and farmed) has given us some affinity to farming.

People: When I was volunteering with Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory at Standford, I met Dr.Thomas George, an agricultural scientist who quit not just his job but his 15 year career to literally take things in his own hands and help farmers by creating a Fair Market System. He has been working successfully with farmers in Kenya for the past three years through Vipani, an organization that he created to launch his ideas. Whenever he visited the US (a few times in a year) we would meet and he told us about all his difficulties and successes. We highly value his experiences as they have given us a close-up view of all the challenges and opportunities involved in farming. We have also been inspired by Timbaktu Collective in Andhrapradesh, thinking of training with Center for Indian Knowledge Systems and meeting the folks at The Academy of Natural Farming in Karnataka.

Books and Websites: Many years ago, on the last night of our stay with a friend in Goa, we read the book One Straw Relovution by Masanobu Fukuoka and were super inspired. Once we bough the land, we started reading up on sustainable farming related material and naturally came across Permaculture and read Bill Mollison's Introduction to Permaculture over a few months (it is not an easy read). We researched on the net and and read the experiences of many people who have been doing sustainable farming for decades in India and in other places.