Puducherry farmers adopt homeopathy for farming with stellar results

A growing cadre of cultivators around Bahour in Puducherry are shifting towards a model of agriculture that replaces chemical fer-tilisers and pesticides with homeopathic formulations under the banner of the AHAR project by the Sri Aurobindo Society.

- HD Bureau

The initiative, which began in 2018 under the guidance of Dr Uttareshwar Pache-gaonkar and in collaboration with the Society's Svarnim unit, initially targeted vegetables and has expanded into paddy and other crops across the region.

The AHAR experiment emerged as a response to mounting costs and ecological damage associated with conventional high-input farming.

According to the Society's documentation, field trials in Bahour employed a rand-omised block design with eight treatments—six homeopathic combinations, one NPK fertiliser treatment and one untreated control plot. Farmers Arjunan and Saravanan participated in the third season of paddy experiments, in which the best-performing homeopathic treatment was adopted for further testing.