I had heard about Khem uncle’s orchard from my neighbours in Banjar. His was among the first of orchards I visited during December 2019, when examining histories of the apple tree, and intertwined life and culture in Western Himalayas. What did it mean to cultivate, care, or survive in montane worlds damaged by global warming, agrochemical overuse, pesticide resilience etc.?
To give you some perspective, Banjar is a small town in the Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh. At around 1400 meters above msl, alongside the river Tirthan, Banjar is home to some 5000 households. The Banjar Valley is also referred to as Tirthan Valley. Before independence, the town of Banjar was a common halt on the mule path connecting British centres of Kullu and Shimla - the valleys of Sutlej and Beas across the Jalori Pass. Today Banjar is an administrative block within the Kullu district. I live in Banjar.
Among my neighbours and mentors here is Tara auntie. Auntie Tara has written and published two volumes of short stories that narrate tales of everyday life here in the valley - families, agriculture, deities, shamans, seasons, festivities, education, aspirations, jobs, money... As a first encounter, her short stories invited me through the door, into everyday life here. This encounter was eerie, but also unsurprisingly familiar, surrounded by elements similar to those throughout the Western Himalayas, and broadly, South Asia. Now 61, auntie Tara did her schooling in Banjar, but then lived most of her adult life in Delhi, including a few months in Russia. In 2010 she returned to Banjar, together with her husband. When I shared with her my keen interest in apple trees, and intertwined life in these parts of the mountains, she told me about Khem uncle - her younger brother, who lives in Pujaali.
One of the evenings I called Khem uncle. Mobile phones are pervasive in the area, and almost throughout Himachal Pradesh, barring a few sparse trans-Himalayan pockets. Banjar and most of the villages around have decent LTE connectivity. Pujaali is some 15 kilometres from Banjar, and I dreaded the idea of travelling out early in one of those freezing December mornings. The grass outside is usually covered in frost up till 10 or 11 in the morning. Thankfully, he asked me to come by noon. What could have been more delightful, than cycling up to Pujaali, under brisk, warm sunshine? And that is exactly how it unfolded. When I reached Pujaali, uncle Khem was basking shirtless under the crisp winter sunlight. Given the harsh winter here, without any automated systems of indoor heating, these sunlit days provide an incredibly satisfying measure of warmth.
On the way from Banjar to Pujaali.
Uncle Khem’s is a wooden house built in the traditional Kath-Kuni style. And is situated right between his orchard and fields. His wife is out in the garlic field. He was also going to join her but stayed back for our meeting. He prepared some sweet tea, and we sat down in the courtyard for a conversation.
Pujaali from uncle Khem’s courtyard
Uncle Khem’s orchard consists of some 600 trees. He tells me that new orchards in the region primarily consist of new spur varieties - improvements of the Delicious cultivars, such as Jeromine, Scarlet Spur, Scarlet Spur 2, Superchief, among others. These trees are small and densely planted in a hexagonal pattern, 6 feet from one another. It’s been three years, he planted some 350 new trees - the new, small, spur varieties, thus marking the third generation of apple trees in his orchard. Uncle Khem’s older trees primarily consist of Royal Delicious and Kaali Devi (Black Ben Davis). The latter act as pollinators to the Royal Delicious trees.
The third generation apple trees.
Uncle Khem
Uncle Khem’s father got the first apple trees in the early 1950s. There were exceptionally few literate men during that time. He was a primary school teacher, posted near Kullu in Jari. Jari is a small village on the road to Kasol and Manikaran. When he first saw apple orchards, he asked people, what it was? ‘Owing to road access people in Kullu were more progressive’ says Khem uncle. They were not only selling apples but also rootstocks and grafts by that time. His father brought the first of apple trees in the region. When the seller in Kullu had asked him, what apple cultivars he wanted, uncle Khem’s father had no idea. He just said, ‘I don’t know. Give me some of all you have’. He brought about 100 trees, of different kinds. They planted them in rows. Uncle Khem recollects his childhood working with these trees.
Today the new trees start fruiting at 3 years of age. For the old trees, it took between 10-20 years to bear their first fruit, and then to reach full bloom. Back then uncle Khem’s family had only a basic idea of what it would require to care for these trees and build a good orchard. It often required attention to the trees, to learn. We just put cow dung, learnt to make tauliya, and during winter had put choona (calcium carbonate). Without any pruning, these trees were huge. “You won’t believe - each of those trees yielded some 600 kilograms of apple. The 60-70 tree orchard, by the 70s, produced two trucks worth of apples”. “Apples sold for ₹0.4-0.6 a kg. Those trees lived, till about 2010.
““No one knew about pollination.””
People here knew little about cultivating tree crops. The Banjar valley had for most of known history been relatively a pastoralist community with some reliance on agriculture. Agriculture had mostly involved the cultivation of millets, amaranth, and other grasses such as wheat and corn. Cultivating trees was altogether new. The way Uncle Khem talks about it sounds as if the trees were actively teaching them, how they ought to be cared for. ‘We never did any cutting (pruning) etc. It involved experiments, errors, and observation. It involved attention to the growth of trees, their leaves, branching, flowering, setting, and fruition. Eventually, experiments in pruning, and paying attention to rhythms of trees branches, and growth taught gave them the sense of what would work. What were the right conditions of moisture and light, that would allow both - the tree to grow, and for them to reach out to its furthers branches during harvests?
Listening to uncle Khem troubled me because traditional knowledge is often presented as a wholesome system that had figured things out. But listening to uncle Khem’s memoir, it felt that traditional knowledge largely meant continuous attention to the tree, its soil, one’s labour, and the environment. If such attentiveness constituted traditional knowledge through the 50s and 60s through everyday observations, experiments, and care; traditional knowledge in 2020 isn’t altogether different. Uncle Khem’s attentiveness to his trees felt no different. When walking through the orchards, he knew which branches had some spots on them, where the skin was weakening, he knew which grafts stood where, and what will need more intensive care as summer dawns. And this feeling only got stronger as our conversation went further.
“No one knew about pollination”, uncle Khem recollects from his younger days. This became a problem as the second generation of apple trees took the land here through the late 70s. Uncle Khem had made this second generation orchard when he was 16. Unlike his father’s generation, for whom apple just meant apple amidst all the available cultivars, ”jo hain saare de do”, uncle Khem’s generation had figured out the differences between cultivars, those sweeter, red, and, crisper. And they wanted to do better. Those that fruited early, at the most remunerative prices, or those that took the best shape and colour. Growers, by this time, knew that the ‘Royal Delicious’ fetched the best price. Thus, this generation, including uncle Khem, planted the Delicious, only to realise that yields went substantially down. ‘Thus we learnt about pollination and pollinators’, and grafted cultivars such as the Golden Delicious and Kaali Devi (Black Ben Davis).
Through the 80s and 90s as commerce became more important; chemical fertilisers, insecticides, and pesticides became a commonplace. In the beginning, it was just urea. As apple sales became a more stable source of income, accompanied by other emerging forms of livelihoods such as jobs, people started reducing their livestock. ‘A large livestock meant two people working on it all the time’. Not only did fertilisers emerge as options to increase productivity, but they also became necessary in the face of decreasing livestock.
““Cuts require care””
Just as Uncle Khem’s father had little idea of what cultivating trees would require, Uncle Khem’s generation had little idea of what these new agrochemical solutions meant. The thought was, ‘more is better’. “Where we had to put 100 ml, we would put 200 ml”. The insecticides were seen as universal solutions to all kinds of infestations and ailments. ‘If you have a fever, and are prescribed an antibiotic, taking ten is not going to make things better, but much worse. We need to not only pay attention to the pests but also the scale of infestation. Earlier if a tree had scale (an indirect pest), farmers would spray the entire orchard. If three trees suffer a scale infestation, you investigate, and take care of them.”
This is also something that has confounded apple growers. It’s not just Uncle Khem’s orchard of some 600 trees anymore. Including his siblings, his family orchards have some 3000 trees. None of his siblings live in the village anymore. Nor his children. The Pujaali village with about 60 families has some tens of thousands of trees. The sixty families with their small orchards combined sell apples worth about a crore (ten million) ₹. A number of these families just like Uncle Khem’s siblings don’t live in the village anymore. When an orchard has an infestation, it can readily spread throughout the area, like a pandemic through the air, water, and soil. While Khem Uncle knows all of his trees in person (that’s the kind of detail I felt, walking with him through his orchard), he can’t take care of the sixty other orchards in Pujaali, let alone those in neighbouring villages. For several years the horticulture department of state of Himachal Pradesh ran an extensive program to rejuvenate abandonment orchards not only with new plants but the extensive treatment of soil and accompanying biota to make the land habitable for new trees. Abandoned orchards are a point of frustration, complaint, and at times even fights among apple growers. ‘There was a great demand for such a campaign’, Negi Ji had told me once at the state horticulture office in Banjar. Negi Ji is an agriculture extension officer in Banjar. But it was only when I walked through uncle Khem’s orchard, that I realised the scale of concern.
Not only scale (pest), several pest infestations have rattled apple orchards since the 90s. One of the scab infestations during the late ’90s grew huge to the point that the state of Himachal Pradesh paid growers across the state to bury their entire produce underground. Mites, Wooly aphids, cankers both bacterial and fungal, viral rots, are among rising concerns often associated with several factors including abandoned orchards, global warming, and even imports of new trees from other countries. Uncle Khem points me to a patch on one of the trees, ‘this is weak, and will need attention’. He speculates the link between global warming and the rise of canker infestations. Several of his trees have died owing to that.
A weak spot
“The first generation of trees lived for 60 years, the second generation for 40, let’s see how long will this generation survive”. Uncle Khem also believes that it is the introduction of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and fungicides that have limited the lifespan of apple trees, including the Royal Delicious trees, the first of whom lived to be sixty. ‘As the use of fertilisers, insecticides, and fungicides came into being, the initial administrations were careless and ignorant. Now farmers are more attentive to what they use - the needs of tree in terms of these chemicals. Also, the intense care in the form of pruning decreased the tree’s life expectancy from 65 to 40.’ “Cuts require care”, he says, “fir dhyaan to dena padega”. He speculates that the present spur varieties we're standing amidst will have a life expectancy of about 30 years.
Is it possible to abandon the use of agrochemicals? “Maybe”, he says. But there is no system of knowledge out there that can tell, how. Traditional knowledge isn’t something out there, but something that is iterative and formative, just like traditions themselves. That knowledge will be built through gradual, constant experimentation and attentiveness. An attentiveness that is a part of the attention to specific pests, diseases, and possible treatments. Tradition and nature have also at times been misused as cannons for misguided nostalgia. Last year an agriculture scientist who works for an agroecological corporation sold Uncle Khem inputs, claiming solutions that never took ground. Uncle Khem believes that he must have earned a commission to have built trust in such a manner. These inputs were costlier than conventional agrochemicals and did not affect his trees or pests.
“In face of such silliness about techno-fixes and techno-apocalypses sometimes it is hard to remember that it remains important to embrace situated technical projects and their people.
They are not the enemy.”
The state is promoting natural farming, but its knowledge systems are extensively dependent on adoption, experimentation, and observation by farmers. While it’s been popularised in the name of Zero Budget Natural Farming, there’s a parallel industry of Natural Farming inputs on the rise, often more expensive than their chemical counterparts. While ‘Zero Budget’ is a novel thought, it’s inconceivable that uncle Khem who lives along with his wife cares for not only his orchards but also his absentee siblings, will with his wife, have the time to rear as many cows or bulls (without leaving them astray to trespass into people’s lands), let alone create their natural inputs. Second, there’s no certainty whether they’ll work in the first place. Besides, unlike seasonal crops, ineffective solutions may kill long-standing trees, lest let loose a pandemic in the orchards.
Yet such knowledge systems vastly depend on rhythms of competition and collaboration within the community. Just as Uncle Khem’s family pride themselves on being the first among families to introduce this tree into the region, others want to pioneer an agroecological approach. They’ll take the risks, and create a ground for others to follow. Perhaps you should subscribe to this blog if you’re interested to know these stories. In Banjar valley, there’s a celebration of such entrepreneurial zeal that defies unsurmountable odds. Next, I plan to pen those stories here at The Apple Tree Blog.
Some commentators and scholars have criticised agriculture scientists, state departments, and extension programs for their active support to contradictory objectives supporting both agroecological movements together with extensive pedagogical and physical support (in form of subsidies) for ‘conventional’ chemical-intensive agriculture practices. Listening to uncle Khem, I feel that such support is not only necessary but also healthy. In her book Staying With the Trouble writes Donna Haraway, “in face of such silliness about techno-fixes and techno-apocalypses sometimes it is hard to remember that it remains important to embrace situated technical projects and their people. They are not the enemy”. According to Haraway these people and their situated technical projects are the places to produce generative odd-kin’ - string figures and configurations for staying in/with the trouble.