Two of us, mostly. One practice.
New Farmer is Karan Manral and Yogita Mehra, working out of Goa since 2011. Karan runs the coaching, workshops and writing. Yogita has led our field-programme work — including a seven-year engagement with the Chorao Island Farmers' Club. Most things you'll see on this site are one or both of us.
The story.
In 2011, we started growing food on a small plot in Taleigao, near Panjim. The reason was simple and selfish: the food available in Goa's local markets wasn't particularly trustworthy, and we wanted to eat better. What began as a kitchen-garden experiment became an obsession, then a discipline, then a career.
We learned by doing, mostly from mistakes.
Over the years, Yogi Farms expanded from that first plot to larger farms in Taleigao and Santacruz. Later, we renamed ourselves New Farmer — the work had shifted to helping other new farmers.
Today, New Farmer is a mix of teaching, coaching, farming, writing, and field-programme work — all inform each other.
Who we are.
New Farmer is Karan Manral and Yogita Mehra, working out of Goa since 2011. They came into farming together that year and have worked across overlapping but distinct areas since. The simple split below covers most of what each of them does day-to-day.
Karan Manral — coaching, workshops, writing
Came to farming in his thirties after a career in technology marketing and media. Runs the coaching practice and the workshops, and writes about Indian agriculture in public — for The Morning Context and on Medium. Mentor on the Farmizen 12-week organic farming bootcamp. Was part of the OFAI team that processed 100+ farmer presentations for OWC 2017.
Yogita Mehra — field programmes, agronomy
A long career in field-level work with farming communities. Led our seven-year engagement with the Chorao Island Farmers' Club from TERI's Western Regional Centre — agronomy, the organic-vegetables transition, mechanisation, marketing strategy and farmer engagement across 2008–2015. Heritage crop work on Chorao red-kernel rice and Mancurad mango, and on-ground partnerships with NABARD, the Toyota Foundation and TERI.
When we say "we" on this site, we mean New Farmer as a practice — Karan, Yogita, or both, depending on the work.
How we think about farming.
Start with the business, not the plants. Most new-farm failures are planning failures, not growing failures. Who will buy, at what price, matters before what seed to sow. We learned this the hard way and now spend most of the early coaching hours here.
Observe before you intervene. Every piece of land has things it wants to tell you — sun, soil, water, wind, what grows unprompted. The work goes faster when you listen first.
The two sides talk to each other. Coaching insights from one new farmer's planning crisis often surface the same patterns we saw in a Chorao paddy season ten years earlier. The field-programme work and the coaching work inform each other; we try to keep them in conversation.
The farms.
A chronological sketch of the farms New Farmer has grown across. Every method we teach on this site has been tested on at least one of these beds first.
Almeida Farm · Taleigao · 2011
A ~1,000 square-metre plot in Taleigao. Our first season of organic experiments and the beginning of what became the New Farmer practice.
Pinto Farm · Santacruz · 2012 onwards
Roughly a hectare in Santacruz. Larger scale, different land, different questions.
Gomes Farm · Taleigao · 2013
About 1.25 acres back in Taleigao.
The Chorao Farmers' Club field programme.
From 2008 to 2015, Yogita led a seven-year engagement with the Chorao Island Farmers' Club — a NABARD-registered collective on the island of Chodan-Madel. The programme, run from TERI's Western Regional Centre with support from the Toyota Foundation, brought heritage rice branding, premium mango programmes, an organic-vegetables transition, paddy revival on khazan land, and a working operational backbone to a community of smallholders. By 2010, NABARD recognised the Club as the best-performing of 43 farmers' clubs in Goa; its President was honoured by the Union Agriculture Minister in Delhi.
Karan supported the programme with marketing and communications, including authorship of the announcement and field-note posts on the Club's blog.
The OWC 2017 work.
In November 2017, India hosted the 19th Organic World Congress in Greater Noida — for the first time in the Congress's history, the event was built around farmers presenting their own work. Around 700 farmer presentations made up the Farmers' Track.
We were part of the Organic Farming Association of India (OFAI) team assigned to Farmers' PowerPoint Presentation Processing. Within that team, Karan and Yogita worked closely with farmers on all the presentations — turning raw field experience, across languages and formats, into clean decks that could hold up in front of a global audience. More than 100 of those presentations came through their hands.
Farmers' PowerPoint Presentation Processing
Karan Manral · Yogita Mehra · Ana Mesquita · Savio D'Souza · Shamika Mone · Binita Shah.
We're in the process of cataloguing those presentations here as an open archive — real farms, real methods, real problems, with attribution intact to the farmers who presented them.
Written, spoken with, worked with.
A partial list of publications and programmes we've written for or worked with:
- The Morning Context — From Fork to Farm, a 12-part monthly column on Indian agriculture (2021–22)
- Medium — long-form essays on organic farming, peri-urban agriculture, and food security
- Farmizen — mentor on the 12-Week Organic Farming Bootcamp
- OFAI — part of the team that processed farmer presentations for Organic World Congress 2017
- TERI — programme implementation for the Chorao Island Farmers' Club, 2008–2015
- The Toyota Foundation — multi-year funding partner on the Chorao programme
- NABARD Goa — institutional partner on the Chorao programme