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Essays, guides, and longer thinking

The things we'd tell you 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.

§ 01 · 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.

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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The Morning Context · 25 Jan 2022
Natural farming is great, but are we ready for it?
Zero-budget natural farming is getting policy backing across India. A harder look at what actually happens when millions of farmers try to switch at once.
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The Morning Context · 22 Feb 2022
Real estate is killing agriculture
Farmland is worth more as a residential plot than as a crop field — and that single economic fact is reshaping Indian agriculture in ways nobody voted for.
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The Morning Context · 22 Mar 2022
Subsidy or saanp-seedhi? The curious case of unspent government funds
Every year, huge sums allocated to Indian agriculture go unspent. Where does the money get stuck, and why do the farmers it's meant for almost never see it?
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The Morning Context · 26 Apr 2022
Can irrigation mega projects transform agricultural productivity?
India keeps building massive dam-and-canal systems to solve its water problems. A closer look at whether the scale actually delivers — or whether smaller, distributed solutions would do more.
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The Morning Context · 24 May 2022
Climate instability is poised to capsize Indian agriculture
Monsoons that arrive late, leave early, and deliver in bursts instead of steadily. What this new climate reality does to a farming system designed around the old one.
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The Morning Context · 28 Jun 2022
Why we need to revive food diversity urgently
India once grew thousands of rice varieties, dozens of millets, countless forgotten greens. Now most of us eat from the same half-dozen crops. On what we've lost, and why it matters.
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The Morning Context · 26 Jul 2022
Indian agriculture's 'labour problem' won't just go away
Rural workers are leaving the fields faster than mechanisation can replace them. Why the shortage keeps getting framed as a problem rather than a signal worth listening to.
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The Morning Context · 23 Aug 2022
So, the good news is…
The closing essay in the series. After a year of writing about everything that's broken in Indian agriculture, the honest case for where the hope actually lies.
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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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Medium · May 2015
Is Goa finally getting serious about agriculture?
A decade-old read on where Goa's agricultural policy was heading — and, with hindsight, a useful snapshot of how much has and hasn't changed since.
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§ 02 · 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.

§ 03 · Open archive

Farmer presentations from OWC 2017.

An open archive of farmer presentations from the 19th Organic World Congress (India, 2017). Real farms, real methods, real problems — in the farmers' own words. We were part of the OFAI team that prepared these decks, now hosting them here for new farmers to learn from.

About the archive → Browse presentations
§ 04 · Next step

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