Our Story

Vallandai in 2007 was not farmland. It was scrub.

For decades the land here had been given over to prosopis juliflora, the thorny bush locally called semaikaruvel or kaattu karuvelam. Local people grew it, burned it, and sold the ash. It was a living, but it came at a cost nobody had calculated. The bush drew groundwater relentlessly. Season after season the water table fell, until the soil could no longer support a crop at all.

The farmers gave up. Land that should have been productive sold for ten to fifteen thousand rupees an acre, and even at that price there were no buyers. Ramanathapuram became one of the driest districts in southern Tamil Nadu.

That same year, a group of like-minded farmers from Punjab made a decision that most people around them thought was a mistake.

They had spent their lives growing wheat and legumes in the brown soil of Punjab. Now they were proposing to farm red soil, in a different climate, in a state where they did not speak the language, three thousand kilometres from home.

Fifteen friends pooled their money and began buying land. They rented a house in Virudhunagar and drove out to their fields each day. The locals told them plainly it was a futile exercise.

The first year brought no rain. Some of the group went home. Others left later, convinced nothing would grow. A handful stayed.

From 2010, the work was clearing. One hundred and fifty acres of thorny bush, removed by hand and machine. Then tilling. Then levelling. That alone took more than a year.

Planting still was not possible. Without water, saplings are just an expensive way to watch things die.

So they went after water first. Borewells across the cleared land, drawing whatever the ground would give. Rainwater harvesting structures to catch the monsoon before it ran away. An old well on the property cleaned out and turned into a reservoir. Drip lines went in next — and critically, the drip layout was designed before the planting marks were made, so that every tree would sit exactly where water could reach it.

Farming was established in 2011. In 2012, the first saplings went into the ground.

One decision shaped this farm more than any other, and it was the decision to admit what we did not know.

Around 2009, before there was an orchard to show anyone, the group approached Dr T. Arumugam at the Agricultural College in Madurai and asked a direct question: what will actually grow in this soil, and how should it be planted?

That habit never stopped. When a doctorate-holding agronomist was needed on the ground, one was hired — a decision that raised eyebrows among farmers who had never paid for advice in their lives.

"Spending money for specific scientific knowledge is a wise investment."

Government support was pursued the same way. The Departments of Agriculture, Horticulture and Agricultural Engineering provided subsidy assistance for drip irrigation, raingun, sprinkler, solar pumpset, sprayers and power tiller — schemes available to any farmer willing to do the paperwork.

Ten years later, in 2019, Dr Arumugam wrote a letter recording what the farm had become. He had advised it before it existed.

Nobody in the group had grown mango before. Nobody had grown amla, or guava, or sapota, or coconut.

So they experimented, and they did it carefully. Ten to fifteen saplings of a variety at a time, planted and watched. What thrived was expanded. What struggled was dropped. Mango saplings came from Salem, other stock from nurseries around Madurai.

Over several seasons that patience turned into knowledge — a specific, hard-won understanding of exactly which trees will succeed in Vallandai's soil. It is not knowledge you can look up. It only exists because somebody spent years getting it wrong first.

The trees began yielding in 2016. The quantities were small, but they were real.

Language came before anything else. The group learned Tamil, because you cannot work alongside people you cannot talk to. Today three farming families live on the farm and twenty-five people work here, moving between Tamil, Punjabi and Hindi through the working day.

Help went both ways. Farm tractors were lent to neighbours who had no equipment. Farming techniques were shared with anyone who asked.

Festivals are shared too. Lohri, Holi, Baisakhi, Rakhi, Teej and Diwali are celebrated on the farm — and so are Pongal and Tamil New Year, alongside friends from the village.

The measure of this is not our acreage. It is the Village Administrative Officer writing, in 2019, that the number of farms in Vallandai has greatly increased since Akal Farms came up, and that local villagers have adopted drip irrigation and sprinklers after seeing them working here.

Land here that once sold for fifteen thousand rupees an acre now goes for around one and a half lakh. Local farmers have gone back to farming their own land. That change is the part of this story we are proudest of.

At the centre of the campus is a prayer hall where Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji is installed.

For the families who live and work here, it is simply the anchor of the day. Work begins with it and ends with it. Through the first years — the failed rains, the dead saplings, the seasons when nothing came up and there was no reason to believe the next season would be different — it was the reason people stayed when leaving would have been the reasonable choice.

Farming this land was never only a technical problem. Anyone can drill a borewell. Continuing to drill after the third dry year requires something else.

The hall is open to anyone who visits, of any faith or none. Sangat and langar are shared the way they have always been shared.