Organic: The birds like it too!

Three years ago, Hartej Singh was just another cotton farmer in Punjab. Today, he8217;s also a budding conservationist, claiming to be almo...

Three years ago, Hartej Singh was just another cotton farmer in Punjab. Today, he8217;s also a budding conservationist, claiming to be almost single-handedly responsible for the resuscitation of local birds.

8216;8216;After suffering bollworm-induced crop failures for seven consecutive years, I went organic in 2001,8217;8217; says Singh, 35, of Mehta village, Bathinda district. 8216;8216;Then late one evening, I spotted this big flock of birds descend on my fields. They were the common mynah, locally known as gitaran. They feed on the tobacco-bud worm, locally called moti sundi, which thrives on cotton leaves, vegetables and fodder.8217;8217;

Even as Singh was celebrating the arrival of this natural pesticide, he noticed weaver birds making themselves at home in his 16 acres of cotton fields. 8216;8216;At one time, weaver birds were very common in this region, but of late they had become rare,8217;8217; he says. 8216;8216;So I was very excited to see them breeding in my fields.8217;8217;

Environmentalists familiar with the area attribute the disappearance of the birds to the heavy pesticide presence. 8216;8216;Chemicals used in the fields have done massive damage to the bird population in this part of the state,8217;8217; says G S Dhaliwal, a senior ecologist with the Punjab Agricultural University. 8216;8216;Birds common at one time, like the mynah or weaver birds or even the sparrow, are rare now.8217;8217;

Hailing the sighting of the birds as 8216;8216;a kind of revival of ecology8217;8217;, Chander Prakash, a senior zoology professor at DAV College, Amritsar, says the bird-pest cycle can only be beneficial for agriculture. 8216;8216;This is just what 8216;natural8217; Japanese farmer Fukoka preaches. On an average, a bird can take care of 250 pests, making poisonous chemical pesticides redundant.8217;8217;

Hartej, on his part, is happy to have stolen a march over his neighbouring rivals.

8216;8216;I see them working overtime to rid their fields of pests, while my chemicals-free fields virtually invites the birds to take care of the my headaches,8217;8217; he laughs.

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If Hartej does have one worry, it is the regular farmers8217; habit of dumping their crop in the market even before organic farmers can harvest theirs.

8216;8216;Because they use pesticides, they get their crop slightly early. Wheat8212;which I also grow8212;doesn8217;t pose a problem, because there is a high demand for organic wheat.

8220;But for organic cotton, we don8217;t get good prices,8217;8217; he complains.

Now if that worry, too, would vanish with the birds8230;