Bon Bitan: Transforming rural backyards into food hubs.

Climate change is making rural West Bengal (an Indian state) food and nutrition insecure. This is a huge problem for West Bengal with the population density of West Bengal being 1029/km^2 (compared to the country’s average 416 /km^2) as per the 2011 census. Over 70% of the people of the state depend on agriculture for their livelihood.  

In recent years erratic rainfall, storm, flood, and heat waves have increased in the state. Being right next to the Bay of Bengal makes it even more vulnerable. Chopping of indigenous trees and getting rid of wetlands are further intensifying the climate crisis by removing local microclimates. Loss of biodiversity also affects food diversity as many of the species we are losing used to be part of the local diet or helped in productivity (like bees). All these are making the rural population vulnerable to catastrophic events.  

Take Rabi, for example. Rabi, a tribal farmer, lives in his village Kharsinga, West Medinipur, West Bengal (where we work) with his wife and ten years old son. He has one-third of an acre of farmland. The family relies on seasonal work for livelihood. Government. rationing helps them access carbohydrates (rice, wheat), but lack of money stops them from accessing vegetables and fruits around the year. He tries to grow vegetables on a piece of land he got from someone in exchange for sharing the produce. Rabi’s efforts in growing have not been very successful, as he cannot provide the high chemical inputs his hybrid seeds seek. Families like his traditionally got a large part of their food from foraging. Biodiversity loss is reducing this option.   

Catastrophic events like COVID showed us that we are not yet well equipped to handle mass reverse migration, especially dealing with food shortages. Scientists predict that such catastrophic disasters will only increase in the coming decades.   

Intensification of cash cropping is not helping either, as farmers are more dependent on the market to access their food. All these make the rural population incredibly unprepared to deal with food and nutrition crises in changing climate.   

In recent years government, private companies, and nongovernmental sectors have been working hard to create climate-resilient food systems through agroforestry, natural farming, and more. These are much-needed timely interventions. However, most initiatives focus on farmland or relatively large pieces of barren land. Many villagers like Rabi of densely populated states like West Bengal have only access to tiny fractions of land. Moreover, many of these efforts focus on increasing producers’ income without securing food for their consumption. While increasing producers’ income is excellent, that does not ensure a resilient local food system. In a crisis, the producers’ basic needs must be met. Then only we can expect them to grow food for others.

  Not having a resilient food system in rural India (with a current focus on Southern West Bengal) to secure livelihood is the problem we would like to address.  

While most initiatives focus on relatively bigger pieces of land, we focus on small lands that are lying next to homes unused/underutilized with an average size between 10 m^2 to 100 m^2. These lands are often overlooked as a potential abundant food source. Most individuals in rural areas will have access to such lands (either private or community land). Our approach is bringing a neighborhood together to grow forest gardens. Forest gardens look like forests with trees, plants, and shrubs of different heights and functionalities with the primary purpose of growing vegetables (e.g., spinach, amaranth, tomatoes, yam ), fruits (guava, mango, chiku), spices (ginger, turmeric, chili) and herbs (basil, lemon grass).  

Contrary to industrial agriculture, we view a garden as an ecosystem (through agroecological principles) where all living beings intricately interact to create a dynamic and complex system. This will help us to develop a resilient food system while increasing local biodiversity. To design, plan and manage these gardens, we will use permaculture principles, syntropic farming, Natural Farming, and more of these techniques.      

We are developing four model gardens since August 2023 to show the community a lot of food can be grown in a small space. Besides that, we are working on a 15-month pilot from August 2023 to develop five forest gardens in Rabi’s neighborhood (the person we mentioned in the problem section) working with five families. Establishing a forest garden takes 3-4 years. This project will focus on the first year, where the participating family members will be given hands-on training on growing diverse vegetables for home consumption and saving at least 20% money on food. In the subsequent years, we will add more plants, fruit trees, and more while bringing other families from the neighborhood to the program.   

After the first year, we start pilots in new areas. In three years, we want to reach five neighborhoods creating at least 25 gardens. We want to get another five neighborhoods and create 50 gardens in five years. We will use formerly trained family members to facilitate the new group of families without expanding our core team a lot. With each family having, on average, five members, we will be directly reaching at least 250 people. Indirectly we will reach over 1000 people.

Our gardens will provide habitat and food for a dwindling population of insects (e.g., bees, grasshoppers), birds (e.g., sunbirds, sparrows ), and amphibians(e.g., frogs) and will help increase their population. Along with trees and plants, all these living beings contribute to ecosystem services by recharging groundwater, stopping soil erosion, pollinating, keeping pest populations in control, and dispersing seeds, and more. In near future our gardens will help create microclimates to mitigate the effect of climate change locally.

All these animals play a very important role to maintain our ecosystem in balance by keeping the food chain in place (e.g., pollinating, eating pests).

After five years, we will work with other partners nationwide to replicate our model.

Our solution currently serves the rural population, especially the marginalized class of Southern West Bengal, India. People like Rabi whom we mentioned in the problem are the primary focus to work with. Over 95% of families here rely on farming as the primary source of revenue. The average farmland holding will be an average of one and a half acres. For the marginalized class, it is usually less than one acre, and they depend on seasonal farm work as the primary source of their livelihood. 

Ironically even after being essentially an agrarian community, over 90% of families depend on the market for buying food. People are market-dependent because rice is the main cash crop, and they need to consider the possibility of growing food around their homes.

Take Sujit’s family. His family is working with us to create a garden. Sujit is studying 10th standard and lives with his parents who are in their late 40s. Besides farming, Sujit’s father works as a daily wager to meet his family’s needs. During the last winter, they grew different greens, tomatoes, radishes, chili, and tomatoes. This not only gave them access to poison-free healthy vegetables they were also able to save at least 50 INR a week. Because of the extreme heat, we could not grow much during the ongoing summer as this garden has water access issues. This extreme heat is a sign of climate change. This shows the urgency of a climate-resilient food system. Our forest gardens can provide once we can establish enough diversity and water harvesting facilities in these gardens.

Our solution will help families like Rabi’s and Sujit's to have access to diverse vegetables and fruits throughout the year. A catastrophic event like COVID has shown us why we need to save some food for the future. They will also have stored vegetables like pumpkins and yams for such events in the future. More importantly, with our intervention, we will prepare our communities to create a climate-resilient local food system in the face of climate change.

As we move along through our bio labs we will create entrepreneurial opportunities through the local produce through our Bio Labs. This will inspire the locals to innovate and create economic opportunities in rural areas. People especially the youths who move out to cities for better opportunities and live in unhealthy conditions can build their life in their villages while making the rural economy strong.

Home-grown food has always been in demand for its freshness and the love that people usually put to grow this food. Our forest gardens will attract travelers to get the flavor of our gardens and village life. Through this, many locals can start their homestay. This agrotourism will create better opportunities for livelihood for the locals.

Our intervention will also benefit local flora and fauna by providing habitat and food for many living beings. 

Growing up in rural West Bengal (the same village where we are working), I had a very memorable childhood. Living with nature, I foraged for food, ran behind insects, followed bird trails, and climbed trees. This early upbringing made me fall in love with nature and my village. As an adult, I got world exposure while I was doing a Ph.D. in Sweden. During this time, I realized the global ecological crisis and its interconnection with the food crisis. I saw the ecological crisis in my village as human action is depleting biodiversity. I realized if we don’t act soon food crisis will not be very far especially as our climate is changing.  This shook me so much that I decided to discontinue academia and come back to my roots in 2022 to work with my community. Before coming back, I traveled to over 5 countries where I volunteer in different regenerative farms to understand what is happening in other countries to create a local food system while helping biodiversity. I also got a scholarship in kanthari (www.kanthari.org) to learn how to run an organization with the goal of social change.

Besides me, there is another full-time member who is working in the team. His name is Suvendhu Das. He grew up in our village and has a deeper cultural understanding of the locals. Suvendhu, worked with his grandfather from an early age on their farm. This exposed him to the traditional wisdom of local farming practices from a tender age.

While I  (founder and chief executive officer) look after the administration, program design, fundraising, networking, and community interaction, Suvendhu (Garden and Community Manager) takes care of our model gardens and creates new connections with communities, and maintains the old ones with regular visits and interactions. We hire people from the community for our garden work. Currently, we are looking to hire a gardener who can manage our existing gardens and create new ones, so that Suvendhu can focus more on research and development of our model gardens. Our strategy is to hire people from within the community who are affected the most because of the existing problem and are willing to work with us.

We have two mentors as well who guides us online.

Abhijit Sinha (mentor): The co-founder of Project DEFY helps us with program design and radical thinking. He also helps us with organizational structure and planning. 

Arjan Basu Roy (mentor): Arjan is the founder of Nature Mates, an organization that works on conserving small animals. He helps us with the conservation aspect of our project.

We have been working on the ground since August 2022 to create four model gardens working with four families in our village. These model gardens give us a fair understanding of how to grow diverse vegetables (spinach, amaranth, tomatoes, okra, brinjal, pumpkin, ) in a small space minimizing human intervention and without using any chemical input. Besides growing food, we are experimenting with creating a water harvesting system to increase groundwater recharge while reducing the water need of the garden over time. Our gardens grow various annuals (plants that live less than one year) and perennials (that live more than one year like papaya, and pigeon peas) vegetables. We are also growing many fast-growing supporting plant species (like gliricidia, Mexican sunflower) that are helping us to increase soil fertility. Here is a five minutes video of our work and our village

Our solution so far served over 100 people. There are 20 members of the

four families that we work on creating these model gardens. Besides that, we distributed vegetables among many families, which have been enjoyed by over 50 people. In September 2022, we organized a nutrition garden training at least ten people attended. In the last eight months, we have distributed indigenous seeds that we bought from outside to 15 people. We also partially assist four other young children in creating their gardens.

Let us tell you story of Ankan. He is an inquisitive child from our village, currently studying in the sixth standard. Seeing his interest in gardening, we gave him some seeds during the winter. He did well, and now, with increased confidence, he is planting his summer vegetables. As we told him about the ill effects of plastic on the soil, he started collecting them as well. He demonstrates his garden to his friends, which we are sure will inspire more children to do the same. You can read more about what he is up to here.

Here is the story of Sujit. He is studying in the 10th standard. During one of our conversations, we could see he has an interest in plants and trees. He is creating a vegetable garden with us, which increases his understanding of how to grow food. He takes the initiative to save indigenous seeds and also talks about it with his friends. His family also gets access to food.

Here are some pictures of our recent harvest that we share with our neighbours.

We are in the beginning stage of our organization. So finanncial support is one of our requirements. However, we are more interested in getting mentorship and expert help in mindset shift, behavioral change, and system change. Our goal is to conserve biodiversity with a human-centric approach where people start to appreciate and value natural wealth beyond resources to extract money from. How can we bring systemic change worldwide where people start taking responsibility for their environment? What kind of new economic system can we build using these little forest gardens which will strengthen the rural economy? How can this new financial system encourage reverse migration? How can ancient culture and traditions play a role in achieving our goal? How can we collaborate with other organizations, irrespective of geographical barriers, who are thinking in the same line? We have many questions like these but only some of the answers. Solve's platform will help us connect with our potential mentors and other future partners with whom we can discuss and co-create solutions.

 We are also looking for media exposure to talk about this critical issue and change the perspective of the global audience on how small spaces are usually perceived. As we start creating more gardens, we would be interested in applying data science to the gardens to optimize productivity through biomimicry.

We are looking at the land from a different perspective. We see small pieces of unused or underutilized land as potential abundant food sources through forest gardens. Forest gardens look like forests with trees, plants, and shrubs of different heights and functionalities, with the primary purpose of growing food. When designed and planned well small spaces (our primary focus is 10 m^2 to 100 m^2) can grow a lot of food. As they are small, they are easier to manage as well. With the relevant design, it will not take more than 4-5 hours per week to manage. These small spaces have the potential to create a local food system. Russian Dacha have proved that in the past. Yet, small spaces are often overlooked. We are bringing people’s attention to this.

Our goal is not just to grow food but also to conserve and restore local biodiversity. The loss of biodiversity, the food and nutrition crises, and their connection to climate change can be addressed holistically through our approach. Our innovation is bringing agroecological practices/principles like permaculture, agroforestry,biodynamic agriclture, and syntropic farming and coupling them with local indigenous knowledge.

Moreover, we are placing particular emphasis on developing landraces. A landrace is a variety of plants that are genetically diverse and are adapted to local conditions. Given that we are in the middle of climate change, we must develop landraces.

To increase community cohesion, we are working on building common resources like food and seed banks. In the food bank, the families in a neighbourhood will come together and save food like pumpkins, yams, etc., for climatic catastrophes or in case we fail to produce enough in the gardens.

When we work with families, we don’t work with a particular member of the family but with all the members. One family member takes the lead, but through regular activities storytelling sessions, eco-treasure hunt games we make sure all the family members are involved in the process.  Games like eco-treasure hunts will show the importance of conserving biodiversity through experiential learning. Regularly, local eco-newsletters will be published that acknowledge the efforts of community members working for the common cause.

We will start Bio Labs which will be a local hub for innovation where anyone can come and experiment with different local produce. These opportunities will open many possibilities for the locals. Such spaces will provide exposure to rural entrepreneurs and boost the forest-based economy.

When we implement the same program in other geographical areas, the process might remain the same, its inputs, e.g., growing cycles and pest management practices, will vary. We rely on the community's older generation and historical facts to access local indigenous knowledge. This can work anywhere, as contextualization is inbuilt into the process.

For the next year, we have the following impact goals in mind

1. Food Security: Participating families have a steady supply of organically grown healthy food around the year from their gardens. Traditional indigenous foods, some of which are moving towards extinction, are brought back to diet and grown in these gardens. To ensure this, we plant different vegetables and greens with the families in the garden, including the edible plants that have lost most of their habitats. 
2. Increase in biodiversity: Increase biodiversity in flora and fauna on the land where these gardens will be. In these gardens, we not only plant that gives us food but also support species like marigolds, mustard, mint, and more which attract beneficial insects like bees and butterflies. The plant diversity on top of the soil also ensures microbial diversity in the ground. 
3. Climate action: Enabling participating families to see the climate crises and understand the role they can play (creating eco-allies) towards local solutions. Through different events, we bring the topic of food security and its vulnerability in the face of climate change to our participating families. At the same time, they will have first-hand experience building a resilient food system. 

Over the five next five years’ time, we want to impact in the following ways.

1. Mindset shift: If the pilot succeeds, we will have a model for a biodiversity-positive food system and a mindset change that brings a demand for such change, thereby making this a cyclical process. This mindset will infect others, and we expect to see entire communities change, not as benefactors of an intervention but as pioneers and leaders of it.
2. Local economic system: When a large number of people start creating forest gardens, it has the potential to create a local economic system through entrepreneurship, and agrotourism. We will make bio labs where anyone from the locality can experiment with their garden produce or another local item to create value-added products. These bio labs will have the potential to turn into a rural innovation hubs to groom new entrepreneurs. We can open doors to people from nearby regions to visit our gardens so that they can experience village life and see what is possible in a small space.
3. Resilient local food system: Our focus is on rural people, for whom farming or working as farm labor is the primary source of livelihood. Most people depend on the market for vegetables, fruits, green, and spices. Our intervention will reduce this market dependency and create a more localised food system where people grow a large portion of their food in their backyard.
4. Increase in biodiversity: Local trees like palm, dates, arjuna, banyan, peepal, mango, and jamun will increase in numbers. If we fail to save some old-growth productive fruit trees, there will be enough clones of such trees in the region it belongs to. The number of insects and birds like bees, butterflies, ladybugs, cranes will increase.

Here are impact measuring tools for the first year.

Food security: Each family organically produces 10 kg of diverse vegetables and fruits a month while saving over a minimum of 5 USD a month (a family on average spends 10 USD a month for vegetables).This will help to reduce poverty, provide food for many.

Increase biodiversity: The diversity of life on the land where we are working goes up by at least 4 times than when we started.

Climate action: Participating families actively talk about climate change in their day-to-day discussions and talk about how forest gardens can solve some of the problems that climate change pose.

Here is the impact measuring tools for the five years: 

Mindset: At least 50% of children and youth takes up gardening as a hobby and promotes gardening to others.

Local economic system: At least 30% of youth are interested to start their entrepreneurial journey using the produce of forest gardens.

Resilient local food system: At least 40% of families in all neighborhoods grow at least grow 50% of their food vegetables and fruits from their gardens. 

Biodiversity:

We start seeing bee colonies in the villages which are rear to find these days. The insect and indigenous tree populations increase.

Our goal is to conserve local biodiversity while creating a local resilient food system. We want to solve this in the following way.

Our first focus on plant diversity. This is because if some of the plants fail to produce, there will be some plants that will still produce, and perhaps, they will do better irrespective of the weather condition. Moreover, while focusing on diversity, we select mostly local species of plants, trees, and herbs. The diversity of flora in a place makes many microclimates and creates food and habitat for different types of fauna. This makes sure we are taking care of the local biodiversity.

Our second focus is on soil building. Soil that has a lot of microbial life (bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, earthworms, etc.) is good for plant growth as they convert the food into a plant-available form. Microbes feed on organic matter; we put a lot of emphasis on putting a lot of living and dead organic matter in the soil.

Our third focus is on developing landraces, especially different vegetable varieties. Landraces are genetically diverse, locally adaptable varieties that are initially developed through cross-pollination of different varieties and then selecting the desired property over generations. This makes sure we are developing climate-resilient crops to make sure our food system is resilient while increasing the diversity of local vegetables.   

  We believe our solution will work for the following reasons. The awareness that climate change is negatively affecting the food production is increasing. Catastrophic events like COVID have shown why we need to have a local food system.

Diseases like cancer, diabetes, sugar, etc., are on the rise even in rural areas. People understand this rise in diseases is related to lifestyle and food habits.

As much of the rural community relies on farming for their livelihood, the increasing unpredictability of climate is reducing their income. So, there is a consensus among rural people that our food production needs some shifts. If successful, our solution will provide them with this alternative without sacrificing their current livelihood. This is because we are focusing on unutilized small spaces around homes to create forest gardens. The way forest gardens are designed and created increases the local biodiversity. For any solution to be successful, we need enough people to adopt it. We are confident once we create a small example, more people will come to be part of this solution. Moreover, at a later point, we will work on creating income from these gardens by processing the food. This will be a huge incentive for people to adopt our solution. 

Through the mass adaptation of forest gardens in rural backyards would be able to change the current status quo of food production while conserving the biodiversity.

We are using traditional and modern agriculture technologies that are aligned with regenerative farming practices.  

Water harvesting: We dig trenches in our gardens following contour lines to slow down water. This helps water to move vertically underground instead of flowing above the ground. As a result of climate change, we usually have heavy rain followed by a spell of drought. This is why it becomes extremely important we harvest and store water underground with low-cost technologies in order to be adaptable by people with minimal resources.  

Fertilizer:  Historically India has been largely an agrarian society and still is. Livestock especially indigenous cows play an important role in our agriculture with their microbe-rich manure, urine, milk, and curd. We have many indigenous technologies using cow dung and cow urine as a base to make different fermented fertilizers like Jeevamrut which enhances soil fertility. We also prepare indigenous micro-Organisms (IMO) using Korean Natural Farming.  

Pest repellent: We have many plant-based pest-repellent liquids to deter pests in our traditional system. Dasaparni is one of them where 10 different types of leaves are mixed and fermented with cow urine before it becomes ready to spray on the plants. We have seen spraying Dasaparni also deter monkeys, possibly for its smell. This is a new finding which we did not know before. Moneky is a big problem in many places specially to grow vegetables and fruits. Such findings will help us to equip small growers to protect their harvest.  

Pachanga: Panchang is a localized Indian calendar system that is calculated based on the calculation of ancient Hindu texts. Besides many things, it announces the weather forecast, when to plant seeds, when to apply fertilizer, and more. With time people have lost expertise in how to read Panchaga. We are trying to revive it and bring it into practice.  Here is a scientific explanation behind the precision of Panchanga. 

Guild system: In nature, a particular group of plants and trees grow well together. When this pattern is repeated repeatedly, that is called a guild. Each of the plants has its niche in that particular ecological system. We replicate such a guild in our forest gardens.   

Data Science: At a later stage when we have many gardens, we plan to use the power of data science to feed the data of our existing gardens. This will help us to predict what to plant where in our newly designed gardens based on the microclimates.

Through our work, we envision a just society. That is why we are currently focusing on working with local tribals who are historically marginalized. They are the ones who are going to suffer the most because of the climate crisis. Our approach is to bring them on board first to prepare them to pioneer in creating a local food system and lead the other sections of society. Our approach focuses on involving the whole family in gardening instead of focusing on a particular gender or age group. This way, we ensure the entire family gets connected to the garden, and their co-learning happens among the family members. With this, we bring diversity to our work. After finishing our pilot project in the neighborhood, we want to start new pilots in other areas. During this time, we would like to hire participants from the first families as trainers to train the new families. We prefer to choose women for these roles to create an equitable society.

Our focus is on rural people, especially the marginalized communities who have access to at least 10 m^2 of land to grow food. We will give hands-on training to the communities where we will work on how to grow food diverse food in small spaces around their homes. Through this training, they will learn how to design, plan, and manage their gardens. Some of them will also learn how to work with others to create such gardens.  

We are following a community/neighbourhood approach to spread our work. We go to nehibourhood and find out the initial adopters (5/6 families) of forest gardens. Every community has a group of people who understand the importance of growing food either monetary or health or both reasons. Often, they don’t have the necessary knowledge or tools to start. They become our initial adopters. We work with them and train them to create their gardens. After the first year of training the family members who show the most interest, learn a lot through gardens, and have an interest in working with other people make them our facilitators. These facilitators along with our core team train the other neighbours who want to start their forest gardens. In our experience over 80% population in our region are interested to grow food, but often lack of models and inspiration stops them from growing. The garden of initial adopters will inspire their neighbours to start as well.

We are a non-profit. We will leverage donor funding and community contributions for every new neighbourhood we create our project in. To start and run a project we need funds for the first four years until the plants/trees establish, routines are set, the families know how to manage their gardens and the neighbours start cooperating with each other. After four years we would not need additional funds to sustain those particular projects. In these four years, we expect the financial situation to become net positive for the families who either save on food costs or earn new income through processing and selling of food grown. At a later stage, the neighbourhood can avail money through the ecosystem services that their garden will be providing.

In the short term (less than five years), we create a consistent donor/support network that helps us create develop our model and create the first implementations. This is our R&D and experimentation phase.

Beyond this, while we want to continue being a non-profit, allowing us to work in the margins of society, we believe that we will add several revenue streams from entrepreneurial activity that will be generated at the next stages of our project. We also see government collaborations as a scaled impact possibility.

We have a network of financially well-off people who are in a position of regular donation for extended periods. We are working on creating sustain circle group for generating a steady flow of income through this.
 

Based on how the forest gardens evolve, we plan to start a cooperative to sell some garden produce after processing them. That might take around 4-5 years from now to create such a venture. If or when that happens, this could be another source of our revenue.

We started a little over a year back. We ran a project with five families, from August 2022 to January 2023. We were able to raise small funds for that initial project. Currently, we are continuing the next phase of the project and funding for it which will last next until October 2023. Recently, we have been selected for the Indian Youth Climate Network cohort 2023. We have received around 600 USD from them.