Grown with intention

ASSAM BADAMI PINK POTATOES · ASSAMESE KAZI LEMONS · GOALPARA, ASSAM

Bibari Rabha: The Woman Who Farms, Leads, and Refuses to Stand Still

Goalpara District, Assam

Bibari Rabha

HERITAGE POTATO & KAZI LEMON GROWER · 

GOALPARA, ASSAM

Women Farmer. 

Self-help group leader. 

Mother of two. 

Bibari does not choose between 

these roles — she holds all of them at once,

and makes it look like the most natural thing in the world.

“A woman should not only manage the house. She should also manage her own income, her own ideas, her own land.”

In the plains of Goalpara, Bibari Rabha tends two crops that most of India has never heard of — the Assam Badami Pink Potato and the Assamese Kazi Lemon. She grows them not on a large farm, but on carefully tended plots that her self-help group of thirty women manages together, dividing labour, sharing knowledge, and splitting profits at the end of each season.

The Badami Pink Potato is named for its skin — the soft pinkish-gold of raw turmeric, turning amber as it cures in the shade. The flesh is dense and dry, nothing like the watery potatoes that arrive in Goalpara's markets from the plains. Bibari plants in October, once the monsoon has pulled back and the Brahmaputra's floodwaters have receded, leaving behind a dark, mineral- rich silt that rebuilds her soil's fertility every single year.

The Kazi Lemon grows alongside, on the slightly elevated ground 

near her homestead. It is not a lemon you squeeze — it is one you

inhale first. The essential oil in the thick, bumpy skin is so concentrated that 

breaking the surface of a single fruit fills a room. Her mother used it in bihu

cooking — one leaf, one sliver of zest — and Bibari uses it the same way

still. She has grown her orchard from three trees to fifteen, supplying a crop that carries a Geographical Indication tag but remains little known outside Assam.

Bibari's self-help group has — thirty women from the surrounding area — that she considers her most important project. The group divides the farm work equally, makes decisions together, and ensures that every woman keeps her own share of the earnings independently.

“Many women in our area work very hard but have no money of their own,” she says. “That is what I want to change. When you have your own income, you can make your own choices.”

Taru Naturals has been working with Bibari's self-help group for more than 5 years — running natural farming training courses, sharing supply chain knowledge, and connecting their produce to markets in Mumbai. The produce travels from Goalpara's fields to kitchens across the country, carrying the character of the Brahmaputra floodplain in every batch. For Bibari, that distance is not just commercial. It is proof that what she grows here — the pink potatoes, the aromatic lemons, the particular intelligence of ten women working land together — is worth something beyond the local market. It always was. Now the world is beginning to catch up.

PINK POTATOES: HARVESTED FEBRUARY – MARCH · KAZI LEMONS: HARVESTED OCTOBER – JANUARY 

PAHADI BLACK POTATOES · MANDI DISTRICT , HIMACHAL PRADESH

Pushpa Devi Thakur: What the Mountain Cold Creates

Mandi District, Himachal Pradesh

Pushpa Devi Thakur

MOUNTAIN FARMER· MANDI, HIMACHAL PRADESH

High in Mandi's valleys, where ridges cut the sunlight short and nights stay cold long past when the calendar says spring, Pushpa Devi grows the only potato whose darkness is a quality, not a defect.

“City people see the black flesh and think something is wrong. I tell them: that is the cold doing its work. That is Mandi inside the potato.”

Mandi sits in a deep valley where the Beas River bends and the mountain

walls rise close on both sides. The sun arrives late and leaves early. 

Even in June, the nights carry a bite that the lower plains have long 

forgotten. It is this persistent cold — valley-floor cold, shadow cold, the

cold of stone walls and narrow skies — that drives anthocyanins deep

into the flesh of the Pahadi Black Potato, turning it from cream to violet

to near-black depending on the depth of the season's chill.

Pushpa Devi has been selecting seed potatoes from her terrace for twenty-two 

years. She chooses by touch and weight, not appearance. A Mandi black 

potato that looks unremarkable on the surface might hold the most complex 

starch beneath. She has learned to tell the difference in her hands, the 

way a musician hears a note before the rest of the room does.

Her terrace catches the morning light for a few hours before the ridge shadows it again. The fields are amended with composted organic matter — not by ideology but by long practice. The soil in Mandi's terraced farmlands is old and particular, responsive to care given consistently across seasons. You cannot rush it. Pushpa Devi does not try to.

What we cannot carry ourselves does not leave the village, she says. The road 

conditions inMandi's upper reaches mean harvest happens at the pace the land 

allows. That limitation is, paradoxically, a form of preservation. The Pahadi 

Black Potato exists in part because it has never been easy to extract in bulk. 

Scarcity protected it where scale would have standardised it away.

Her daughter is learning the seed selection process now — slowly, seasonally, 

the right way. The knowledge of which plant to save from, which variety to protect, transfers only through years of standing on the terrace together. It cannot be written down without losing something essential. Pushpa Devi knows this. She is patient.

HARVESTED AUGUST – SEPTEMBER · MOUNTAIN SPRING-FED IRRIGATION, MANDI VALLEY TERRACED SOIL

SATARA POMEGRANATES · MAN TALUKA , SATARA , MAHARASHTRA

Dattatray Patil: Farming in the Language of Water

Man Taluka, Satara District, Maharashtra

Dattatray Patil

POMEGRANATE ORCHARDIST · MAN TALUKA, 

SATARA

Standing between rows of 

pomegranate trees on the Deccan plateau, Dattatray has spent three decades learning a single conversation — the one between a farmer, a tree, and the precise amount of water withheld.

“We give the trees less water than they want. That is not neglect. That is the 

craft".The fruit concentrates everything

it has into the aril. That is where the flavour lives.”

The Deccan plateau of Satara is volcanic basalt country — ancient, mineralically dense, unforgiving in summer and precise in what it rewards. Dattatray Patil's pomegranate orchard sits on this basalt shelf at Man Taluka, where the soil carries sixty million years of geological complexity in each handful. It is not an easy place to farm. It is an extraordinary place to grow a pomegranate.

Satara pomegranates are different from Nashik pomegranates. Different soil, different stress regime, different flavour profile. Where Nashik fruit grows in sandy alluvial soil with generous irrigation, Satara fruit grows in basalt with deliberate restraint. Dattatray practises stress irrigation: in the month before harvest, he reduces water to half of what the trees prefer. The trees respond by directing every available resource into the fruit. The arils swell, darken, and concentrate. The juice thickens with mineral depth.

His father planted this orchard in 1987 with sixteen trees. Dattatray has expanded it to sixty- four. His son, now studying agricultural science in Pune, plans to return and experiment with a late-harvest variety that could extend the season into December. Dattatray has agreed to give him two rows to trial. “The orchard needs young ideas,” he says, “but it also needs someone who has stood in this soil long enough to understand what it responds to. That takes time. It cannot be studied from Pune.”

The drip irrigation lines that run between his trees are calibrated not for maximum 

yield but for maximum quality. Satara farmers have understood stress irrigation 

for three generations — not as a scientific technique but as inherited intuition. 

You have to know the tree well enough to read when it is stressed and when 

it is struggling. The line between those two states is thin.

Dattatray has spent his adult life learning exactly where it falls.

HARVESTED SEPTEMBER – NOVEMBER · DECCAN BASALT PLATEAU, DRIP-IRRIGATED ORCHARDS

MANIPURI QUEEN PINEAPPLE · KANGPOKPI H ILL S , MANIPUR

Ngangbam Ranjita Devi: Twelve Women, One Van, and the Sweetest Pineapple in India

Kangpokpi Hills, Senapati District, Manipur

Ngangbam Ranjita Devi

PINEAPPLE GROWER · KANGPOKPI HILLS 

WOMEN'S COOPERATIVE

On the terrace-carved hillsides of Kangpokpi, Ranjita leads a cooperative of twelve women farming a pineapple that has no equal in sweetness — and a community 

that has no equal in resolve.

“When our van broke, we didn't panic. We sold the entire harvest in two days. That is the advantage of trusting each other completely.”

The Manipuri Queen Pineapple is small, dense, and absolutely without fault. No watery centre, no fibrous core, no sourness at the edges — only sweetness from the first bite to the last, consistent across every fruit in every row. It received Geographical Indication status in 2017, a recognition that what grows on these Kangpokpi hillside terraces cannot be replicated anywhere else. The terraces themselves — carved by Ranjita's ancestors at an angle that drains water precisely as the pineapple plant requires — are part of why.

Ranjita's cooperative spans twelve women across four villages. 

They share a cold storage van, a set of harvest tools, and a WhatsApp group 

through which almost all coordination happens. When the van broke down 

last season with a full harvest waiting, the group made a collective decision in under an hour: sell everything fresh over two days rather than risk a single fruit to heat. By the second morning, every pineapple was gone. That kind of efficiency comes only from deep trust built across many seasons of working together.

The slope of the terrace is everything. Water runs off at exactly the angle the 

plants need — never pooling, never drying beyond recovery. Ranjita's ancestors built the terraces with this understanding centuries ago. She has not changed them, because she has not needed to.

Some inherited knowledge does not need improving. It needs protecting.

Ranjita's longer ambition is visibility. “When people taste the Manipuri Queen for the first time, they become advocates,” she says. “We just need them to taste it.” She wants her daughter to have the choice to farm or not farm — but she wants farming to be genuinely worth choosing, not a fallback. That means better prices, better access, and a story that travels as far as the fruit can go.

HARVESTED APRIL – JUNE · FARMED HILLSIDES, 900–1,200M ELEVATION

PAHADI MANGOSTEEN · CHAMPAWAT DISTRICT , UTTARAKHAND

Harendra Singh Bisht: The Forest Decides, and the Farmer Listens

Champawat District, Kumaon, Uttarakhand

Harendra Singh Bisht

WILD ORCHARD KEEPER · CHAMPAWAT, KUMAON

The mangosteen trees of Kumaon were here before Harendra's grandfather. He did not plant them. He inherited the responsibility of knowing them.

“Some years thirty kilos. Some years three. We don't fight the forest's decision. We listen to it, and we plan accordingly.”

Nobody planted the mangosteen trees of Champawat. They grow within the mixed forests of the Kumaon foothills, shaded by oak and rhododendron, their roots sharing soil with wild herbs and mosses that have never been disturbed by a plough. Harendra Singh Bisht harvests what the trees decide to offer each year — and has learned, over decades, to plan around the forest's own logic rather than impose a farming logic upon it.

The Pahadi Mangosteen is distinct from the Thai or Malaysian varieties that appear in Indian city markets. Smaller, denser, more tannic. The altitude does 

this — at Kumaon's foothill elevations, the fruit earns its sweetness against the 

cold, concentrating sugars that would otherwise spread thin in a warmer 

growing environment. Attempts to cultivate these trees in valley plantations 

have failed consistently. The saplings grow. They do not produce. The character 

of the fruit lives in the elevation and the particular ecosystem that surrounds it.

Harendra understands the forest as infrastructure. The biodiversity around his trees — the shade canopy, the root competition, the mycorrhizal networks in the undisturbed soil — is not separate from the mangosteen's quality. It is the source of it. When people suggest clearing more land for production, he declines. “The forest is not competing with the mangosteen,” he says. “The forest is what makes the mangosteen possible.”

He has three children, none of whom have yet shown interest in continuing this work. 

The trees will outlive him — mangosteen trees can produce for a hundred years. 

The question is not whether the trees will survive, but whether the knowledge of 

how to tend them will. Harendra is quietly looking for someone to teach. 

The forest is patient. He is trying to be.

HARVESTED JUNE – JULY · WILD FOREST CANOPY, HIMALAYAN FOOTHILL MICROCLIMATE, CHAMPAWAT

AIR POTATOES FROM AAREY FOREST · AAREY COLONY , MUMBAI

Ramesh Waghmare: Mumbai's Oldest Harvest

Aarey Milk Colony, Mumbai — Warli Adivasi Land

Ramesh Waghmare

FOREST CULTIVATOR · AAREY COLONY, MUMBAI

Fifty metres from apartment towers, inside a forest that a city of twenty million people walk past daily without entering, Ramesh harvests a potato that has never been planted by any human hand.

“In the city they call Aarey a green lung. We call it home. We don't plant the air potato. We tend it. There is a difference.”

The Air Potato — Dioscorea bulbifera — climbs the trees of Aarey Forest every monsoon as it has for longer than anyone can remember. It produces small aerial tubers that grow directly on the vine, suspended in the canopy, harvested by 

Warli families who know which vines give sweet bulbils and which turn bitter — knowledge encoded not in any document but in the act of standing in the forest across many seasons and learning to read what is there.

Ramesh learned to read the vine from his grandmother before she taught him to read apage. The shape of the leaf indicates the plant's age. The height it climbs signals the quality of the soil below. The colour of the forming tubers tells you the week 

to harvest. The window is ten days.Miss it and the bulbil turns bitter and requires soaking before it can be eaten. Ramesh has never missed the window. 

His grandmother never did either.

Aarey has survived repeated threats — development projects, metro car sheds, 

infrastructure expansion. Each time, the Warli community has resisted. 

Each time, the forest has survived, though sometimes narrowly. Ramesh sees his harvesting as part of that resistance. An active, inhabited, economically productive forest is harder to dismiss than an empty green space. When he sells air potatoes, he is also making an argument for the forest's right to remain.

When harvested young, the air potato has a mild starchy sweetness with a slightly nutty finish — unlike any cultivated potato variety. The texture is denser, more mineral. It tastes of the forest it came from, which is to say it tastes of something that has no agricultural equivalent anywhere in India. You cannot grow this on a farm. The forest is the farm.

Ramesh takes school groups into Aarey when he can. Children from the towers that border the forest — who have never walked into the trees that shade their buildings — hold an air potato bulbil for the first time and look at it with something between confusion and wonder. He lets them hold it as long as they want. The forest is patient with them, as it has always been patient with everyone who finally bothers to enter it.

 

HARVESTED AUGUST – OCTOBER · WILD FOREST HARVEST, MONSOON-SEASON, WARLI TRADITION, AAREY COLONY MUMBAI

Grown with Intention

TARUNATURALS · FARM TO TABLE