Health begins in the field
Namaskaram. I am Rami Reddy, a farmer from Kottuvaripalli.
I’ve spent most of my sixty-three years with my hands in this soil, and it has taught me one thing above all: our health does not begin in the hospital. It begins in the field.
When I was a boy, no one here had heard of chemical sprays. Today they are in everything — and what they leave behind does not stay where it falls. It moves. Into our grain, our water, the milk a mother gives her child.
The day I stopped trusting the spray
In 2005 I joined a programme called Non-Pesticide Management. Fifty of us sat together for many days, and we learned one thing we could never set down again: the poison we spray does not disappear. It waits. Chemicals like DDT were banned only after we found their residue can linger for decades — in the soil, in the air, in the grass our cattle graze.
We wanted to see it for ourselves. So we took rice harvested a full year earlier and sent it to a laboratory in Hyderabad, telling them nothing of where it came from. The report came back carrying Endosulfan. A whole year in storage, and the poison was still there.
I have never forgotten that report. It left me with one question I now put to everyone: what, then, are we really eating?
When health is lost, everyone suffers the same — and no amount of money can buy it back.
Nature already knew
When I began asking other farmers to put down the spray, many gave me a fair question. If the strongest chemicals cannot stop these pests, they said, how can a handful of leaves?
I did not answer with science. I answered with what the land already knows.
Cut your hand on a sickle, and a paste of bael leaves will close the wound — no injection, no chemist. A shepherd rubs a little dung and urine near the mother’s udder, and the hungry lamb will not drink till evening. Press cow dung near a desi cow, and even her own calf — thirty kilos of it — turns its head away.
If something so simple can turn away a calf, why not the smallest insect?
So we returned to the old ways: cow-based preparations, medicinal leaves, and where nature still needs a hand, we cover the fruit and let it ripen in peace.
What we grow now
It began with watermelon — sweet enough that we told people to test it wherever they liked. Not one drop of chemical pesticide has touched our land since.
Today we grow mango and sapota, paddy and millets, maize and groundnut, all the same honest way. Our fruit costs a little more, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Without chemicals the harvest is smaller, and a farmer must still feed his own family. But I would rather you eat one honest kilogram than ten grown in poison.
These are native mangoes — the ones our grandparents knew by name. Fruit you can give your children with confidence, and eat without fear.
So think, for a moment, about the rice on your plate. The milk in your glass. The water you pour without looking. If milk can sit for weeks and never turn, what was added to keep it so?
Walk through any village today and you will not easily find one home without some ache, some ailment. More often than not, the reason is on the plate.
I am only a farmer. I cannot change all of it. But I can grow one orchard the way it was always meant to be grown — and offer it to you, honestly.
There is far more I could say. For now, I will stop here. Namaste.