How a School Campus was Turned into an Organic Farm, Yielding 40kg Of Fruits & Veggies
When people were confined to their houses during the lockdown, Vishwa Vidyapeeth turned to organic farming and setting up their kitchen or terrace garden, to be productive. We saw an opportunity in the vacant campus that once bustled with children and turned it green by setting up an organic farm with the help of the teaching and the non-teaching staff.
This was the brain child of our Director Ms Suseela Santhosh. In her words – “The pandemic changed a lot of things. The classes were moved online and without children, many of our non-teaching staff like canteen workers, bus drivers, ayahs (helpers) and cleaners were left with no work and as they didn’t have their routine jobs. We had a small setup of an organic farm in the school, which we decided to expand. That way the staff would be occupied and we would have developed a bountiful farm. Some of them were familiar with farming and others put in the effort to learn.”
The team was in this together and now the School has decided to continue this initiative with school opening up again. Now we grow several vegetables in rotation, as per the seasons. We grow fruits like papayas, bananas, and we also maintain a garden with over 40 herbs. The organic farm spreads across the campus. It occupies the huge kitchen terrace of the school, the backyard and the empty spaces between the buildings. We have also set up compost pits turning the dead leaves into manure. The harvested rainwater and the greywater from the kitchen is used for farming. Additionally, a water channel inside the campus was used to grow over 200 banana plants.
The children who came back to school after the lockdown were introduced to this green initiative and are very much part of it. This is now part of our curriculum. We are involving all our students in the farming activities so that they will also develop a kind of responsibility and will aspire to be self-sufficient.
“Schools shouldn’t be a place where we deliver knowledge only through textbooks. We should prepare them to face any kind of adversities and mould them in such a way that they will adapt to any situation. I feel this initiative will inculcate such values in them.”
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