FARM CANDY

A former motoring journalist becomes a farmer, and it's testing times for his tractor

- Parameswaran Natarajan

It has been a while and some more since I've actually pulled out a laptop to type a story. The keys, which were once so easy to navigate in my past life as a motoring journalist and a communications specialist for an automobile major, are suddenly so very unfamiliar today. But I hope some of the skills around writing a story for you return soon, as a part of a combined muscle and cerebral memory that must somewhere, deep down, still be alive, under the cobwebs and dust of disuse of some 20+ years.

It isn't quite the same when it comes to what I am doing today. I am a lot more comfortable driving a tractor around, not only for the purpose of building a story around it for this article, but also, as part of the bigger picture of weaving the relatively new story of my life as a natural farmer at the Lazy Grasshopper Farm, who along with his family, also runs a farmstay, makes and sells traditional pickles and other value-added products and is soon starting a DIY woodworking workshop for our guests, somewhere in the rural calm of South India.

Okay, I said I was comfortable riding a tractor around, but a tractor isn't about providing its driver any comfort actually. Another, more celebrated motoring journo across the world rides around in an air-conditioned Lamborghini farm implement and even he, I am sure, isn't going to be talking high praise of its creature comforts, ride or handling. After a few hours of ploughing an acre of field or two, you are going to need a very hot bath and massage, that's for sure.