Namaste, Grove.
About us
Farm8 is a 2.5-acre site in Aya Nagar, on the southern edge of Delhi, and it has been tended for two decades. It was begun by the artist and permaculturist Rashmi Kaleka with a collective of fellow artists. The idea was simple and a little unusual: land could be a place where art is made and a place where ecology is practised, and each could teach the other. Over the years it has grown into a place where installations stand among trees, and a planting calendar gets as much thought as an exhibition.
Today Farm8 is held by Farm8 Foundation, a registered charitable trust, and the day-to-day work is patient and hands-on. This season we have sown 26 flowering species as forage for carpenter bees and native bees. Our nursery raises more than twenty vegetable, herb and tree lines, and nothing goes into the ground until it reaches true leaf. We are slowly learning what this soil, this climate and these insects ask of us.
The farm is also a place of learning. We host residencies, camps and internships, and we run nature-based training for schools and groups, so that people can come to the land, work it, and leave with their hands dirty and their questions sharper.
Our collaboration with JNU
We have watched this land change for a long time, but we have never measured it. This September we began to.
We are working with Prof. Usha Mina and her team from the JNU Agroecology Lab on a year-long agroecological and soil-health baseline of Farm8. The team has mapped the farm into zones and fixed permanent sampling plots by GPS so they can return to the same ground season after season. They have begun a tree-by-tree inventory to estimate carbon stock, and they are sampling plot biodiversity alongside the soil itself. In the soil they are measuring microbial biomass carbon and dehydrogenase activity, two ways of reading how alive it is.
Sampling runs across two seasons, once after this monsoon and again before the next, so we can see how the land shifts through the year. Samples are also being archived for future molecular work, so that questions we do not yet know to ask can still be answered from this first season’s soil.
We will share the fieldwork here as a running diary, including the methods, the photographs, the mud and whatever surprises us.
A question to open with: for those of you running long-term soil monitoring, what do you wish you had recorded in your very first season?
Warmly,
Vir Vikram, for Farm8
Website: https://farm8.phime.in/ · Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ayanagarfarm8/