Manas, remember the conversation in Bharatpur, where I argued that wheat farming is nonsense, and that farmers are smart dudes who will figure out an alternative? Well, guess what.

If you drive into the countryside, running into a country cousin is pretty much a certainty. I drove, and I ran into one. The Haryanavi version of "Whassup, my man" roughly translates as "how are the crops doing, my brother". This was the polite question I tossed him, and plenty of answers was what I got. I learned, then, of the dude in my village who gave up wheat farming and planted strawberries (straa-beri in Haryanavi).

This new-age, newspaper reading farmer may have turned to the editorial page, or he may have visited a sarkari demonstration. That is not certain. What is certain, however, is that he learned of the much-fancied drip-irrigation (Israeli Technology!) technique, and it intrigued him. He Thought, and he Thought some more. Whether he scratched his head or his stubble is a point on which there is no agreement among the historians.

Now -- as anyone who goes driving into the countryside will tell you -- a Haryanavi farmer is given to thinking with great force and vehemence. The said farmer does not mince thoughts. He thinks something, it stays thunk. And that sort of thing can not but have consequences. It was thus, then, that wheat made way for strawberry on this dude's farm.

This dude doesn't mince actions either. He is a cutting edge farmer. His late father -- who passed away last year from over-consumption of ghee, bless his soul -- was a local pioneer, the first among his peers to introduce a tractor and a tubewell. Our man, then, imported expert workmen to install his drip irrigation and plant his strawberries. As a result the intrepid and enterprising farmer was set back by half a million, even after his cousin had joined his in his far-fetched plans, thus spreading some of the costs. For Rs 500,000, he had planted an acre of strawberries.

Well, one thing led to another, and the plants grew and bore fruit. Before you could say "Chaudhari Bhoop Singh", the first berry was harvested. Our farmer tasted the first strawberry of his life, and with a quizzical expression on his face decided that he prefers a watermelon any day. Still, so long as rich city people want strawberries, that's exactly what he was going to give them.

And everyday too. Soon after learning that the famous berry does not melt in the mouth, our good man learned that it can melt before it reaches that orifice. He has no access to suitable storage or preservation facilities. He needed to find some mouths before the berries melted. Accordingly, he would travel to Delhi, four hours by road, every other day for three months, to ferry the berry to the beautiful people.

So how did it all end, you ask? It ended well. Luck favours the brave, and who is braver than the goodly Jaat who invested half a million in an idea that makes dotcoms look like Warren Buffet's staid old safe investments? My source estimated that the farmer harvested somewhere between two and four tonnes of berry, which he sold for something like two hundred a kilo. So his first crop alone recovered his investment, and he gets to keep the drip irrigation and the strawberry plantation.

And then he found the goldmine.

In the heartland, Word spreads faster than the strawberry plant, which spreads roots all around and from which you can snip saplings and sell for five rupees a sapling. Of these our protagonist sold some three hundred thousand, causing his kitty to bulge by a substantial million and a half, quicker than you can say "dotcom valuations".

The flip side, of course, was that his old man overdid the celebration and the dose of ghee. That's life. As they say, into each life some rain must fall. Unless, of course, that life is drip-irrigated.

Vijay

ps: In our next issue -- how plantations are replacing grain-growing.