Cultivating soil, saving seeds, and learning to grow food with care – as part of yoga practice, not separate from it.
At Vana Farm, permaculture is not a hobby or a weekend programme. It is embedded in the daily life of the campus. Students who come to practise yoga also work in the garden – not as a chore, but as practice.
The same quality of attention that you bring to asana and meditation, you bring to digging, planting, watering and harvesting.
Mani Raman and Savitri chose this land at the foothills of the Western Ghats precisely because it could be farmed. The soil here is rich. The rains come in their season. The farm grows vegetables, herbs and fruit for the kitchen. What cannot be grown here is sourced from local farmers and the weekly market.
In most of the world, soil has been reduced to a medium for holding chemical inputs upright. At the farm, soil is understood differently – as a living system with its own intelligence, its own relationships, its own timescale. This means no synthetic inputs. No pesticides. No herbicides. The farm uses composting, companion planting, mulching and natural pest management. The processes are slower. The results are more nourishing.
All organic matter returns to the land. Kitchen waste, garden cuttings and dried leaves feed a composting cycle that rebuilds the living soil layer.
Crops are grown in relationship with each other – some protect, some feed, some attract pollinators. The garden is designed as an ecosystem, not a monoculture.
Bare soil loses moisture and life. Mulching keeps the earth covered, slows evaporation and encourages the mycorrhizal networks that connect plant roots.
Diversity is the defence. A healthy, varied garden rarely suffers the catastrophic pest failures of monoculture. Where intervention is needed, only plant-based remedies are used.
The Western Ghats receive abundant seasonal rain. The farm works to capture, slow and store this water – returning what the land once received before it was diverted and drained.
The Tamil Nadu – Kerala border region has agricultural traditions predating industrial farming by centuries. The farm draws on this living knowledge from the farmers and communities around us.
To see soil as a base and not as a property – this is where farming and yoga meet. Vana Farm
One of the quietest crises of our time is the disappearance of native seed varieties. Multinational corporations have patented and commercialised the seed supply to such a degree that farmers across the world no longer have the right to save, share or replant their own seeds.
Vana Farm participates in native seed protection and exchange. The farm grows and saves traditional seed varieties – vegetables, grains, herbs – that are adapted to this region and this climate. These varieties have been developed over generations and carry within them a kind of genetic memory that no laboratory can manufacture.
At the farm, students learn to identify native varieties, select and dry seeds at the end of the season, and understand the network of farmers and seed banks working to preserve biodiversity in South India.
Seed freedom is not a political abstraction. It connects directly to the food on your table, the health of the ecosystem you live within, and the autonomy of farming communities.
Yoga has always taught that the way we relate to the natural world reflects the way we relate to ourselves. A civilisation that patents life and monopolises food has something deeply dis-eased at its centre.
This is an optional path, available to any yoga student who wishes to go deeper into these questions. No prior farming experience is necessary.
Vana Farm periodically welcomes participants for working retreats – periods where farming work is woven into the daily schedule alongside yoga and meditation. These are not volunteer holidays. They are structured learning experiences for people who want to understand how food, land and practice are connected.
What a farming retreat includesMorning and evening yoga and meditation sessions
Yogic Philosophy in discussion and practice
Hands-on work in the garden – planting, composting, harvesting, seed saving
Sessions on permaculture principles and their relationship to yogic ethics
Farm-to-table meals prepared in the sattvic kitchen
Introduction to native seed varieties of the region
Time in silence and in the natural landscape
Community meals and evening reflection
Vana Farm, Kambam Valley
Melagudalur, Tamilnadu – 625516. India