00:00 It's 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning at a cooking class in Bengaluru. It's part
00:06 of a workshop called "Cooking with Friends". The ingredients all come from small farms
00:11 in the immediate area. The vegetables and fruit were all grown without pesticides or
00:18 chemical fertilizers. Some of the fruit are old varieties that the participants, who are
00:23 all urban dwellers, have never seen before.
00:29 I don't know much about native vegetables and indigenous food.
00:35 I would say I've probably seen them being used more on cooking shows. We've literally
00:40 grown up on western food. There's so much of diversity in terms of the food that's grown
00:45 in India.
00:49 The cooking course was organized by Sputnik Farms. The young company has organized smallholder
00:54 farmers from the region into a collective that produces sustainable, organic produce
01:00 from people in the city. Sumit Kaur founded the company to put her ideas for positive
01:05 change into action.
01:07 We thought that through Sputnik Farms we can try to create a more resilient and more sustainable
01:17 kind of food system where farmers get a fair share in the profits, consumers get to eat
01:26 fresh food that has been grown using sustainable practices.
01:33 Native crops have many benefits. Local products don't need to be shipped long distances, and
01:38 harvests don't need to be stored in a warehouse, which reduces carbon emissions. And the plants
01:43 need less water and are more resilient to climate change, as researcher Sheetal Patil
01:49 from the School of Environmental Sustainability at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements
01:54 explains.
01:58 Indigenous crops have evolved over centuries in certain localities. They are resistant
02:03 to pests, they are resistant to diseases and any other kind of adverse climatic conditions
02:09 in that locality. They also have deep roots where they can actually access the nutrient
02:16 and water from the deeper soil depths actually. So that gives good nutrition and required
02:24 amount of nutrient to people and also circulation in the soil.
02:31 About an hour's drive from Bengaluru, the Chikkabalapur district is home to many smallholder
02:36 farmers. They make up to two-thirds of the population here. People like Gaurama, who
02:43 farms a two hectare plot of land and is a member of the Sputnik Farm Collective.
02:49 We started to get our land ready for organic farming in 2012. It was finally deemed usable
02:58 and free of chemicals in 2018. We grow 23 different crops on our land and they all have
03:06 different needs. We have crops that need to be harvested in two months, three months,
03:12 six months, one and a half months. We plant green leafy vegetables too and they need to
03:18 be rotated every 15 days.
03:22 This form of polyculture in which a diversity of crops are grown in the space at the same
03:26 time is central to the idea behind Sputnik Farms. Rotating crops helps soil fertility.
03:34 Due to the staggered harvest, the farmers are ensured a steady income across the seasons
03:39 and Sputnik Farms pays more than the regular market price.
03:44 Sputnik Farms also handles the marketing side of things. On the cooperative's website,
03:48 customers can subscribe fruit and vegetable boxes delivered fresh every week. It is an
03:54 idea that's catching on because more and more urban dwellers are interested in organic,
03:59 sustainable foods, but others still aren't on board with this new way of thinking.
04:08 Some people also feel that consuming exotic and imported food has a symbol of economic
04:16 and social status because it is unaffordable to certain people and also unaccessible to
04:22 certain people.
04:24 The cooking classes help win people over to the farm-of-fork way of eating. Every few
04:29 days another group learns how to make dishes with organic, regional produce. Sputnik Farms
04:35 hopes that many of them will become subscribers and help secure the livelihood of the farmers
04:40 in the collective.
04:40 [INAUDIBLE]
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