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Essays, guides and longer thinking

There's much more than we could say over a first coffee…

Longer essays on Indian agriculture and how-to writing from our own beds in Goa. For quick answers to common questions, try the FAQs.

Essays

Writing on the bigger picture.

Longer pieces on Indian agriculture, farming as a career and the realities new farmers rarely get told. A selection from our writing for The Morning Context and on Medium.

Karan Manral
Karan Manral

From Fork to Farm, The Morning Context newsletter, 2021–22

The Morning Context · 28 Sep 2021
Busting the urban myth of the engineer-turned-farmer
On the romantic fantasy of quitting your corporate job for a quiet farm life, and the reality of what farming actually asks of you.
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The Morning Context · 26 Oct 2021
Technology (alone) can't save Indian agriculture
Drones, satellites, AI crop advisories, the tech industry's pitches to farmers keep getting more ambitious. Why the fundamentals it ignores are the ones that actually matter.
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The Morning Context · 23 Nov 2021
Think beyond hunger, think about food security
India has largely solved for calories. The harder problem, and the one nobody's measuring, is whether what's on the plate is actually nourishing anyone.
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The Morning Context · 23 Dec 2021
Cash crops are killing our farmers
How monoculture cropping: sugarcane, cotton, paddy, locks farmers into a cycle of rising input costs, falling soil health and thinning margins that the system is structured to make worse.
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All essays on The Morning Context →

On Medium

Medium · Aug 2025
FAQs. Food Security & Nutrition in India
Plain-language answers to the questions people actually ask about India's food system, is there enough? for whom? and is it any good?
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Medium · Jul 2025
FAQs. Agriculture's general challenges in India
Why is Indian farming so hard to fix? A ground-level FAQ on the structural problems most policy conversations either skip or oversimplify.
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Medium · Jan 2021
The Future of Farming in Goa must be Peri-Urban
Goa's farmland is getting smaller and the population denser. The case for small farms on the edges of towns, feeding the people who live next door.
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Medium · Oct 2020
Moving to Goa? Ready or not?
For anyone considering the familiar dream of leaving the city for a slower life in Goa, a practical, unromantic look at what the move actually entails.
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All essays on Medium →

What we've taught previously

How-to writing from our earlier seasons.

Practical pieces we've published over the years, drawn from our own growing experiments in Goa. Older posts; still useful to anyone starting out.

Medium · Oct 2015
How to grow food productively and sustainably on hard, rocky terrain
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Medium · Jul 2015
The keys to successfully germinating vegetable seeds
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More how-to writing on Medium →

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