Farming

Srila Prabhupada, who inspired the New Mayapur project, has written, "Human energy should be utilized in developing the finer senses for spiritual understanding, in which lies the solution of life. Fruits, flowers, beautiful gardens, parks, reservoirs of water with ducks and swans playing in the midst of lotus flowers, and cows giving sufficient milk and butter are essential for developing the finer tissues of the human body."

New Mayapur's chief gardener and farmer, twenty-seven-year-old Haribolananda dasa, is in charge of actualizing this Vedic vision on the fields of France. "I come from an English industrial town, Sheffield," he says. "I left school quite young, when I was fifteen, and immediately I got a job growing tomatoes in a nursery for two years. After that I worked as a landscape gardener for two and a half more years. Then, I just dropped out into the youth culture. Eventually, I ran into the Krsna devotees in Amsterdam. They had a rare feeling about them, like pioneers. That aroused my curiosity, and I soon discovered that they were pioneers. They were bringing forward a higher consciousness, and at the same time they had their feet on the ground. So I joined them."

Although ordinarily it takes several years to switch a farm over to organic methods, Haribolananda got some good results from his first organic crop. "We worked a lot of manure and compost into the soil," he says, "and we've been getting yields, for instance in the tomato patch, that would have required almost a ton of chemical fertilizers. And everyone says that our tomatoes taste better than the chemical ones."

Tomatoes aren't the only thing Haribolananda cultivates. "We also raise cucumbers, bell peppers, broccoli, green peas, green beans, lima beans, lettuce, corn, carrots, squash, pumpkins, potatoes, spinach, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and melons.

"Krsna [God] and Krsna's creations are abundant, you know? People today feel out of touch with God and nature, so they don't realize the bounty that's theirs just for the asking (and a little planting and hoeing). If people all over the world raised gardens like this, they'd have no food shortages, and the out-of-doors work would make everyone a lot healthier."

As Srila Prabhupada has said, flower gardens are conducive to physical and mental health. So the devotees have dedicated a full two acres to three thousand carnation plants and five hundred rose bushes, as well as marigolds, chrysanthemums, African gladiolas, and zinnias. Along with some other women, Bhagavan dasa's wife Krsna-bhamini-devi dasi likes to gather flowers and string garlands. "Flowers give the temple a festive feeling," she says. "You naturally think of Krsna."

Haribolananda has added even more variety to what was already a sizable tree population. "There were walnut, chestnut, hazelnut, and cherry trees here when we arrived," he says. "And we've planted a hundred fifty new fruit trees-apple, pear, peach, nectarine, red currant, and black currant. The land is also teeming with sixty or seventy kinds of medicinal herbs-peppermints, pines, rosemary, comfrey, and on and on. And everywhere you go there are plenty of wild blackberries. We've picked a two-and-a-half-months' supply for making jams, chutneys, and pies.

"Only four people, including my wife and me, work the fields full-time. Of course, sometimes other devotees give a little help-maybe an hour of weeding or hoeing or whatever else needs doing." Haribolananda feels that farming in Krsna consciousness has made his life ecstatic.

"I've always enjoyed raising plants, but the satisfaction is a thousand times better when you do it to please Krsna. If you farm out of a spiritual motive, the harvest is a lot more than you can imagine. It's devotion for Krsna. There's pure love involved."