Visiting Soorya Narayanan's farm

Some time back I had blogged about 'Soorya Narayana's weed controlling style' -http://farming-experiments.blogspot.in/2010/11/controlling-weeds-soorya-narayanas.html. Today I just visited to him to show the scythe which I had bought recently.

He is a complete natural farmer and cultivates coconut, banana, rubber and paddy. His farm also has suppota, lemon, mango etc. He does not have any animals, and does not use any manure, but just mulches with coconut leaves, husk etc. He does not have enough water for watering throughout the year. He has around 530 coconut trees which are harvested and last month got around 7000 coconuts. This month coconut is less every where after the severe drought of the last summer. But before that he got around 22,000 coconuts. Here are some photos..

Lemon has lot of fruits

Banana  is an intercrop, and variety mysore pooval (palayamkodan) does very well

Mucuna is seen some places, according to him it just came by itself

Mango saplings are planted in between coconuts

Coconut trees with ground cover

Sappota tree with full of fruits

Base of the coconut trees are not mulched, mulching is done just outside the canopy

Little guard among weeds

Soorya Narayanettan with scythe

19-October-2017
Visited this farm as part of a Jaiva Karshaka Samithy meeting. Also wanted to check about the last summer effect on his farm. Last summer was very severe and I had lost 5-6 coconut trees.

His coconut tree looked very healthy and in some trees, there are only a few coconuts, but some have many. Banana plants also looked extremely healthy and ground cover plants changed...

Some photos...

07-April-2019

Visited his farm as part of the farmer friends meeting. Since it is summer, weeds have reduced, the long grass is not seen. His harvest of 620 coconut trees is around 21000 coconuts. Bananas also doing well, he has maintained only couple of the bananas in each group. He gets around 3000-4000 rupees every week by selling bananas. He applies goat pellet 1 sack (costs around 160 rupees) each for each coconut every year.