Creating crops and music

A Brit by birth, Krishna Mckenzie, a farmer from Auroville, is trying to empower the rural women of Tamil Nadu by letting them achieve food freedom and connecting them back to their local foods through permaculture

In the midst of rapid globalisation everybody is chasing the “American Dream”, though half of the American youth believe it is dead according to a Harvard poll. Krishna Mckenzie, a farmer from Auroville, is trying to empower the rural women of Tamil Nadu by letting them achieve food freedom and connect them back to their local foods through permaculture.

Krishna is a farmer-musician, curiously uncommon combination, but he makes a fine balance between creating crops and music. He founded ‘Solitude Farm and Café’ that serves local food grown on their farm through natural farming methods that make no carbon footprint. A Brit by birth, he came to India more than two decades ago as a 19-year-old teenager and went on to become a farmer.

Auroville, a universal township in Pondicherry located around 150 km south of Chennai has long been a haven for all the western souls seeking peace and tranquility. Krishna got his initial exposure to India from having studied at the Jiddu Krishnamurthy School in London. When asked about it, he says, “From the age 15 to 19, I was in a unique learning environment. It was there that I was introduced to Masanobu Fukuoka, a Zen Master who referred to himself as a simple farmer.”

Back in 2006, he founded ‘Emergence Music’, a band known for its Indo-acoustic genre. Krishna’s passion for farming is complemented by his love for music. “Emergence is about reconnecting people to nature through music and the very music of the band has evolved from nature,” he says.

People Food Music:
Leveraging on his strengths, Krishna started ‘People Food Music’, a community movement to empower rural women of Tamil Nadu by introducing them to local food and teaching them Permaculture. When asked about what inspired him, he says, “One day my family and I went on a bike trip to my wife’s town. We travelled on the back roads. I was deeply shocked by the dismal state of farming in rural Tamil Nadu.

I decided then and there that the lessons learnt at Solitude could be directly translated to these villages. By practicing permaculture they could easily use a fraction of the water and grow a diversity of crops to feed their community and make money at the same time.”

As a next step, the ‘People Food Music’ collaborated with ‘Sustainable Livelihoods Institute’ that focuses on bringing sustainability to villagers in Tamil Nadu. Workshops introducing women’s groups to permaculture began.“After two days of harvesting, creating circle gardens, cooking, eating, making music and dancing, a number of things became clear. The women said, we have to start these gardens in our homes and cook this food for our families,” Krishna says.

“Reawakening the value of traditional foods, these women are empowering themselves to find local solutions to complex problems like diabetes and high blood pressure,” he adds. Krishna holds the large-scale industrialised agriculture responsible for the ecological and nutritional deterioration.“Reconnecting with our local food is obviously the solution.

‘People Food Music’ is our response to the women’s request for help,” he says in a confident tone. “We choose a public space, a school, etc where the women invite the villagers to create gardens and turn classrooms into kitchens, cooking traditional foods together.” Through permaculture, the women would grow healthy food and be unaffected by the rising food prices and changing market economies.

As said by Masanobu Fukuoka, “A society that doesn’t know where its food comes from is a society without culture. And humanity without culture will perish.” Krishna reaffirms the future of mankind only by reconnecting with nature. He says, “At Solitude, our expression of music is as rich as our soil. The songs and musicians of Emergence are an integral part of Solitude’s power to create this celebration. Our music communicates beyond language.”