Minutes of the Workshop: Spiritual Organic Farming Systems @ Dodballapur

A 1 day workshop on the topic "Spiritual Organic Farming Systems" was conducted at Dodballapur. This blog post is the 'minutes' of the meeting.

• There was some delay for all people to reach the venue on their own. The tragedy was that the person due to whom the course was delayed was stuck somewhere in the vicinity and was struggling for nearly 40 minutes to reach the venue. Another person joined 15 minutes later.
• Due to delays, we skipped some theory parts and went direct into action.
• The theory part we skipped, in hindsight, may have been some of the most important foundations to have been covered - it involved vedic philosophy of reality, of doing objective science, and how modern objective science has also validated that the vedic theory of creation may be right. 
• By 11:00 we all finished learning Transcendental Meditation.

• We had some more lectures in pipeline planned about Brihadaranyaka, but that was skipped too due to delay, because we had to have breakfast and everybody was hungry. Shivananda's family had made wonderful arrangements for feeding us all with tasty food.
• We went outdoors into the farm and we had a quick summary of the theory of how vedic seers saw things as a system and how they integrated cows and microbes into farming. We prepared Jivamrutha.

• We saw the similarities between other integrated farming systems such as NatuEco farming by Dabholkar.
• Then we started setting up the BambooPyramid - which was one of the main attractions of this course. 

• After setting this up, we also prepared Bijamrutha so that we can treat the seeds and then sow it in about a day. By which time, the soil would also settle in the pyramid and it will be ready to be used. We still made holes at the bottom most row and planted tomato seedlings.
• We had lunch, followed by some open discussions and about what Permaculture, Systems Thinking and why the upcoming Coop Forest visit. 
• A "handbook" document was shared with participants over WhatsApp.  People were requested to go over the notes, understand and ask questions if any and complete the exercises given.