What 'organic' actually means here

"Organic" has at least three meanings in everyday use and it is worth keeping them apart before anyone makes a buying decision.

The first is the legal meaning. In India this is set by NPOP, the National Programme for Organic Production, administered by APEDA. To sell produce labelled "organic" you must be certified by an accredited agency, follow the prohibited-substances list, keep input and harvest records, and submit to annual inspection. NPOP permits some inputs that many people would not expect — copper-based fungicides, sulphur dust, elemental copper, several botanical insecticides. It is a credible standard but it is not zero-chemical.

The second is the marketing meaning. This is more or less whatever the brand wants it to mean. Some brands are genuinely organic and careful. Others trade on the word with very little discipline behind it. There is no way to tell from the packaging.

The third is the philosophical meaning. This is what each farmer decides for themselves about how to grow food. It varies enormously. Some organic farmers will use everything NPOP allows. Some will use nothing. Most are somewhere in between.

Our definition

For us, organic means five concrete things.

No synthetic anything. No urea, no DAP, no muriate of potash, no glyphosate, no Confidor, no Imidacloprid, no Trichoderma cultures, no synthetic micronutrients, nothing in a packet that is not what it appears to be. The list of things we do not buy is much longer than the list of things we do.

No NPOP-permitted chemistry either. No copper sulphate. No elemental sulphur. No neem oil sprays. No bicarbonate sprays. No pyrethrin. The certified-organic toolbox is open to us and we choose not to reach into it. This is a stricter line than the certification requires and we do it because the upper Yamuna valley is a place where the soil biology and the pollinator population are still intact, and we would like to keep them that way. We have written about this in more detail in why we don't use a single chemical.

Soil that is built up, not just maintained. Compost from our own cows, vermicompost from a pit Pawan manages, jeevamrit three times a year, leaf-mulch from the chir pine belt above the orchard, no-till on the terraces. The soil at year four is measurably deeper and darker than it was at year one. We have not had it lab-tested yet but plan to during 2026 — partly as a baseline, partly out of curiosity.

Meadows we do not mow. The wildflower strips between the orchard terraces are where the pollinators and the predatory insects live. Most "tidy" orchards mow these strips weekly. We do not mow them at all. We have cut paths through them for Pawan's morning walk and a seating spot near the top terrace, and that is it. The bees and the lacewings do the rest.

Records of everything. Every input, every observation, every yield, every loss, photographed and dated. Not because anyone is asking — they aren't, we are not yet selling — but because the only way to learn from a slow system is to write down what you saw.

What we are not

We are not certified. We will probably apply for NPOP certification in 2027 when the trees come into commercial production, mainly for the documentation discipline it forces. But the certification is not what makes us organic. The practices are.

We are not biodynamic in the Steiner sense. We do not bury cow horns, we do not follow the lunar calendar, we have nothing against people who do but it is not our practice. We are interested in what is measurable.

We are not "regenerative" in the way that word is currently used in American agricultural marketing. We are not against the regenerative agriculture movement — quite the opposite — but the word has been applied to so many different things in the last five years that it has stopped meaning a specific practice. We prefer "organic, no chemicals" because it is harder to dilute.

What it looks like to walk the orchard

If you stood with Pawan at the top of the upper terrace at dawn in mid-May, here is what you would see. Light haze burning off the valley. Honeybees on the white clover under the apricot trees, four or five per square metre. A long-tailed shrike on the upper fence post. Soil under the trees that is the colour of strong coffee with no plastic mulch and no bare ground. The smell, if you put your nose close to a fresh cow-dung patty in the compost pit, of fermentation done correctly.

No chemical smell. No insecticide haze. No mowed strip. No bare soil. No-one walking with a sprayer.

That is what organic means here.