Person

Bhaskar Save

Also known as: Bhaskar Hiraji Save, the Gandhi of Natural Farming

(1922–2015) Indian natural-farming pioneer, educator, and the principal practitioner-descendant of the Indian peasant tradition that Sir Albert Howard had documented seventy years earlier. Known in India as 'the Gandhi of natural farming.' Born in the coastal village of Dehri in Valsad district, Gujarat, into the Wadval tenant-farming community. Began farming on chemical inputs in the early 1950s under Green Revolution promotion; after three years of declining yields and visible soil damage he reverted to organic methods, drawing on Gandhi's writings, Vinoba Bhave's article on adivasi farming practice, and his own observation of how the surrounding forest produced abundantly without input. The 14-acre **Kalpavruksha Farm** he built at Umbergaon over the next sixty years became one of the most-visited working examples of tropical natural farming on Earth — a coconut-and-chikoo orchard polyculture that produces commercial volumes with essentially no external inputs and that Masanobu Fukuoka, visiting in 1996, called 'the best [farm] in the world,' ahead of his own. Save mentored three generations of Indian organic farmers, received the IFOAM One World Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010, and his open letter to the Government of India (2006) on the catastrophic consequences of the Green Revolution remains one of the most cited Indian-language documents in the global organic movement.

Cultural

Bhaskar Hiraji Save was born in 1922 in Dehri, a coastal village on the Arabian Sea in what was then the Bombay Presidency and is now Valsad district in Gujarat. His family belonged to the Wadval community of farm tenders. He trained as a teacher, taught for some years, and inherited and bought land near Umbergaon. In the early 1950s — at exactly the moment the Government of India was promoting the chemical inputs that would become [[green-revolution|the Green Revolution]] — Save adopted them. Three years in, he could see the costs: yields were declining despite increasing input, soil structure was breaking down, and the financial trap of input-debt was tightening. He read Gandhi. He read an article by Gandhi’s successor Vinoba Bhave describing the farming practices of adivasi (Indigenous) peoples in central India. And he observed, as Howard had observed before him, that the surrounding forest produced abundantly without anyone fertilizing or weeding it. He reverted his land to organic practice and never went back.

The farm he built over the next sixty years is [[kalpavruksha-farm|Kalpavruksha]] — “wish-fulfilling tree” in Sanskrit. About 14 acres in total; roughly 10 acres in a mixed [[coconut|coconut]]-and-chikoo (sapota) orchard with interplanted papaya, banana, drumstick, mango, and a thick understory of medicinal and culinary herbs; about 2 acres in rotation field crops grown organically. The farm produces commercial volumes with essentially no external inputs — no purchased fertilizer, no purchased pesticide, minimal labor input. The soil is dark, humic, perpetually mulched by the orchard’s own leaf-fall. The water table has risen. The farm operates as a closed system.

In 1996 [[masanobu-fukuoka|Masanobu Fukuoka]] visited Kalpavruksha. He told Save that it was “the best [farm] in the world,” ahead of his own farm in Shikoku. Two of the principal working-farmer figures of twentieth-century natural farming met on Indian ground and recognized each other’s work. The convergence between [[the-one-straw-revolution|Fukuoka’s Japanese natural farming]] and Save’s Gujarat practice is one of the most striking facts in the natural-farming literature — independent practitioners, opposite ends of Asia, no shared mentor, the same fundamental answer.

Save mentored three generations of Indian organic farmers and trained tens of thousands of visitors at Kalpavruksha. In 2006 he wrote an open letter to the Government of India, titled The Great Agricultural Challenge, on what [[green-revolution|the Green Revolution]] had cost India in soil, water, biodiversity, and farmer livelihoods. The letter is one of the most widely circulated documents in the contemporary Indian organic movement. IFOAM awarded him the One World Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010. He died at Kalpavruksha in 2015 at age 93.

Why Save matters to 0mn1.one

Save is the Indian working-farmer node the wiki has been missing. The foundational-source tier has had Howard (the British scientist who learned from Indian peasants) and Shiva (the Indian intellectual and political organizer), but no Indian working farmer at scale. Save fills that node. He is also the contemporary practitioner-descendant of Howard’s Indian peasant teachers — the actual continuation of the lineage Howard sourced his work from.

For 0mn1.one’s tropical-and-subtropical work, Kalpavruksha is a substrate-builder reference operation in the same class as [[mark-shepard|Shepard]]‘s [[new-forest-farm|New Forest Farm]] (Wisconsin) or Götsch’s Fazenda Olhos d’Água (Bahia). The three farms — temperate North America, tropical South America, tropical South Asia — together cover the major working-model references the wiki needs for autonomous-farm design.

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Practical

operated by

Kalpavruksha Farm Bhaskar Save founded the farm in the early 1950s and operated it until his death in 2015; the farm continues to operate under his family's stewardship

shares approach with

Subhash Palekar Indian natural-farming peer; Save articulated the practice, Palekar codified the teachable system that propagates it across millions of farms

Cultural

shares approach with

Cho Han-Kyu Asian working-farmer natural-farming peer; convergent answers from Korea, Japan, and India

voiced by

Green Revolution critique Save's 2006 open letter *The Great Agricultural Challenge* is the canonical Indian-farmer critique of the Green Revolution

4 inbound links · 7 outbound

Cultural

Why Save matters to 0mn1.one

See also

What links here, and how