Rajendra Kumar Jaiman smiles before he answers. Every question — about yields, about the transition, about the hard years — is met with the same unhurried expression, as if he has already been through the doubt and come out the other side. He is not performing contentment. He has simply settled something within himself.
For years, Rajendra farmed with urea and DAP, all the while uneasy about it. He had read things, watched enough YouTube, spoken to people, pieced together a discomfort he couldn’t quite act on. Two years ago, Kunj Bihari Sharma from Sambhaav Trust gave that discomfort a direction. Through Sambhaav, Rajendra learned to make bio-inputs like Jeevamrita, Neemastra, Brahmastra, etc. He visited nearby farms on exposure visits that had already made the shift. And he began.
Rajendra Jaiman smelling the Jeevamrita
Sambhaav’s work in this region followed the revival of the Nanduwali river — a change that transformed single-crop, rain-dependent farms into multi-crop ones. But more water also meant more pesticides, and Sambhaav stepped in with a different vision: soil that lives, inputs that don’t poison, and farming practiced with awareness rather than dependence.
Rajendra walks his farm like someone showing you a home they have rebuilt. He points to the mustard flowers — bees have returned to them. He crouches and picks up a fistful of soil, noting how it is no longer hard and compacted. He talks about his crops — palak, sarson, methi — and three heirloom wheat varieties this season: Bansi, Kaali Baal, and Sona Moti. He hopes to plant more heirloom seed varieties next season.
And then there is Jeevamrita. He insists that its quality can only be known by smell, and so everyone present must smell it. He dips his fingers in, inhales slowly, and nods — satisfied.
Rajendra Jaiman showing the loose soil
The yields are still lower than what chemical farming gave him. He knows this. But he says it the way someone states a fact they have made peace with, not a problem they are trying to solve. I know the produce will be a little less. But look — the soil is loose, full of life. There are beings in it again. The food is clean. He pauses. Take a deep breath. That itself is wealth.
When decisions need to be made on the farm, there is one person Rajendra ji defers to: his eldest daughter, Divyanshi.
He calls her the Sarpanch (a term used for the head of the village).
Divyanshi is in her third year of college. Every morning before she leaves, and every evening when she returns, she is on the farm. She understands its rhythms — which crop needs attention, what the soil might need, what to plant next. Her father speaks of her with a particular kind of pride, the kind that announce itself too loudly.
It is a detail worth pausing on: a young woman in college who has taken on the intellectual and practical stewardship of a farm in transition. Not as a burden, but by choice.
What Rajendra’s farm documents, at this moment, is not a completed transformation but a living one. The soil is healing. The yields are climbing, slowly. The family eats food they trust. The bees have come back to the mustard.
He does not seem to need the numbers to validate what he already knows. Each answer he gives — patient, smiling, unhurried — suggests a man who has done the thinking, weighed what matters, and returned, quietly, to the land.