Aerial view of the lake & the flooded paddy field getting ready for transplant. Shot at the Hyderabad Collective.

Over the last five decades, central and south India have lost 61% of their forest cover. The reason for this rapid depletion of forests is expanding agricultural activities. Urbanisation has pushed farming further away from cities, encroaching on forest lands and causing landscape degradation with severe repercussions. Modern farming practices have undoubtedly contributed to forest depletion in several ways. 

Some of them being

• Deforestation, to make way for large-scale agriculture, directly reducing the forest cover
• Expansion of crop & livestock production, further encroaching on forest land through clearing & overgrazing.
• Large-scale monoculture farming, leading to soil degradation.
• Excessive use of pesticides & fertilisers, which can leach into nearby water bodies & harm adjoining aquatic ecosystems
• Use of heavy machinery and infrastructure development, fragmenting forests and disrupting wildlife corridors.
• Land use conversion of forest land into agricultural land for cash crops or biofuel production, further reducing forested areas.

But farming is necessary for us to survive, and so are forests. 

To tackle this pressing issue, we at Beforest are carrying out forest-friendly farming.

Forest Friendly Farming of Beforest

Beforest collectives were conceived from the need to reconnect with nature and give back to the environment by adopting an innovative approach in the realm of sustainable agriculture & landscape development practices.

Farming Collectives 

You must have heard of ‘collective farming’, but have you heard of a ‘farming collective’ before?

Now you do, and here is what it is.

A ‘collective’ is a group of individuals who come together with a single objective. At Beforest, that objective is to live sustainably on a single, large, expansive landscape. It allows us to build lakes, forest patches and ecological zones to achieve multiple microclimates that help in growing a ‘food forest’ to fulfil the needs of the community dependent on that landscape. 

With the support from the community and with collaborators such as local farmers, wildlife conservationists, permaculture farm planners, naturalists, architects & engineers, landscape managers and more, we can create a much larger impact. By pooling individual resources, knowledge and skills, the community is much more than the sum of its parts – which is precisely what they need to bring back the lost forests, rewild synthesised landscapes and regain the quality of life reminiscent of simpler times.

Large-Scale Permaculture Farming

All activities at our collective are driven by our will to bring ecological & economic sustainability in the long run, which led us to adopt the permaculture framework for coffee farming. The framework is built on a comprehensive set of ethics and principles that keep us aligned with our eco-conscious values while producing fine-quality coffee.

We are in the process of creating an interconnected system to improve the health of our produce by improving the health of our soil. We are trying various kinds of pruning, soil building & water harvesting interventions, and biodiversity improvement methods, which together complete and complement each other, making a closed circular loop. The processes of observing & interacting with the system frequently, experimenting in small patches, studying it for a year and then applying it to the entire landscape has been a major learning for the team.

The process of applying permaculture farming includes 

• Restoring the natural balance and nutrients of the land
• Ensuring healthy water levels and soil diversity
• Generating abundance and diversity of food and resources
• Taking accountability for all the inputs and outputs of the land
• Building a self-replicating, self-sustaining and cyclical ecosystem

Permaculture farming has been tried and tested across various regions, but we are one of the first companies in India to explore permaculture at a scale of 100+ acres.

Growing Food Forests

Forests – the epitome of natural ecosystems – continue to grow and live on for generations without any external support. Nothing in nature is a straight line, so why should our farms be? Hence, we try to understand how forests work and tie it with practices like polyculture and bio-fencing with a well-curated selection of native species to build ‘food forests’. As a result, food is abundant for both humans and animals, pest control happens naturally, micro-ecosystems help each other thrive, and the land turns into a haven for biodiversity.

Blending Farming, Conservation & Restoration Practices

We realised that to farm the right way, we cannot look at farming in solidarity. Not all landscapes are alike. Some require more work, and some are blessed with forest-like ecosystems. Therefore, we work on restoring the landscapes that have been degraded due to decades of unethical farming practices by building soil health (like that of the Hyderabad Collective) and conserving the ones that have abundant forests (like that of the Poomaale 1.0 & 2.0 Collectives) in Coorg. 

Together, these practices form the backbone of our collectives, and their combined effect helps us conduct forest-friendly farming.