Vrikshayurveda
Fermented Natural Farming You've Never Heard of
While Korean Natural Farming & JADAM have gained popularity over the past decade across much of the alternative agriculture space, their foundations in southern Asia share a common history with another technique used for sustainable agriculture— Vrikshayurveda. Vrikshayurveda offers some other additional insights into the processes of developing sustainable agricultural systems, as we will see.
Vrikshauyrveda is one of the oldest applied sciences in ancient India which means quite literally, plant life science. It’s not quite botany or medicine, but covers a wide breadth of specialties. These ancient Indian sciences traditionally are not compartmentalized like Western disciplines because of overlaps; for example, mathematics is a huge component of these practices.
The Indian science of health management, Ayurveda, was well-documented by 700 BCE. This science was soon applied to domesticated animals and garden plants, especially perennials such as shrubs and trees.1 Our ancient and medieval agricultural texts describe what we might now label as organic farming and also describe the operations required for the production of all kinds of crops - grain, jujube, sugar, fruit, vegetable, and others. Rigveda, another text, includes references to agriculture and animal husbandry. Sanskrit texts on farming crops and animal management were called Krishi-suktis. The first well-known text on Krishi-sukti was Krishi-Parashara, around 400 BC. More texts written in later centuries have also been unearthed. Krishi-Parashara (KP) is probably the first-ever 'textbook' on agriculture in which information is logically organized in chapters.
Now, Krishi-Parashara dives into detail on the parts of the plow and other implements of the time, agronomic practices and management — in principle similar to modern ones, cattle sanitation, health, and nutrition, seed health, and prediction of seasonal rainfall based astrological models that are followed by thousands of farmers even today. The primary manures used were cow dung as well as other farm animals, and then small balls of the manure were placed in seed-sowing trenches. Now, there are a bunch of different reference books as part of the ‘veda’ collection, and I won’t pretend to be an expert in understanding how these relate to one another, but each book refers to specific types of practices, and not necessarily stuff that’s just about the actual farming, which highlights that it was more than just the farming itself.
The books were guidance on how communities organized, even advising rulers to provide strong support to farmers and their activities, management of water reservoirs, & even stressing participation of people of all castes in farm-related activities.
There are different books on different practices, and if you’re familiar with India, there are a lot of different languages and religions, and it took quite a while for all of the different books to get compiled. Typically, these books will be called Vrikshayurveda and then the name of the person who compiled it. Now, these books are difficult to work with from a Western perspective because they are descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. It’s never about how to fix a problem, but instead explaining how things should be done.2 Methods and processes for soil replenishment are given by utilizing cow dung, farmyard manure, compost making, mulching shade nets, greenhouse-like structures, water body management, drip irrigation, the utilization of silt, and many more. For example, when describing lands and the need for irrigation, the goal isn’t to make all of the land as similar as possible, like perfect soil, but to utilize each for what it offers. Lands are recognized as being unsuitable for plants for human resources, and that’s okay. Further, texts were often specified for specific regions and tackled the challenges of those specific biomes.
The most significant innovation, probably the first in world agri-history, was the development of fermented liquid manures from organic wastes Kunapajala, literally filthy liquid, or Kunapambu, fermented filth. Kunapajala could be used for seed-dressing, soil drench, or for sprinkling on plants. Surapala's procedure from Vrikshayurveda of Surpala, for treating the soil, involves collecting and storing animal wastes as and when available. Although wastes from dead boars were mentioned first, Surapala expanded the source of waste to other animals, especially those with horns.
After it was cooled, the farmer would traditionally add sesame oil cake, honey, soaked black gram, and finally the ghee. It was suggested to store animal wastes underground, possibly to contain foul odor, as well as to protect materials from scavengers. Surapala also mentions that wastes from other animals such as cows, porpoises, cats, deer, elephants, etc. can be used.
The application of Kunapajala—the “filthy liquid” we talked about earlier— is different from those of other organic manures. Kunapajala is a liquid. Like everything we’ve been talking about, the ingredients of Kunapajala have been fermented, which means the proteins and fats are already broken down into simple low molecular weight products, and more available to plants faster than from the traditionally applied organic matter.3,4 Spraying diluted Kunapajala is a modern innovation.
Now the thing is, there were a bunch of books, and many of them were basically lost or forgotten until fairly recently, so the traditional practice had been largely lost for a thousand years, although variants continued to exist, and chances are, farmers have continuously been working with and even improving some of these practices, right? In most cases, we think things are lost but they continue unabated along the margins of society.
The first person who experimented in any public sense with kunapajala was Valmiki Sreenivasa Ayangarya, a mathematician by training, who renounced materialistic life about 20 years ago and dedicated himself to tribal welfare activities. Valmiki reported excellent results when kunapajala was applied to mango and coconut, and continued to test out variations of Kunapajala, using vegetable wastes and fermented those in human urine. He again observed excellent effects on the growth of several fruit and vegetable plants.
Valmiki prepared kunapajala by aerobically fermenting safari fish (mentioned in Vrikshayurveda) in cow urine and sprayed tea bushes at 1% concentration of the ferment, which he named Indsafare. Valmiki found Indsafari to be both an insecticide and a growth promoter, but to this point, it has not been tested to prove its insecticide capacity. In addition, Valmiki prepared kunapajala from poultry (chicken) bird flesh and called it kukkutakunapa (kukkuta=chicken), and used it to increase kiwifruit yield from 200 pounds to 3500 lbs over a year.5
Now despite these being his recipes, similar guidance could be found in these old texts to control external insects; for example, powders of specific barks are soaked overnight in cow urine and then pasted on affected parts of trees to reduce insect pressure. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to take these ancient practices and apply them. For anyone who has ever tried making traditional food from an old cookbook, the best thing about them is that the concept of measurement didn’t exist. How much salt? Some. How hot? Pretty hot? How long? Til it’s done. These are the answers you get in old cookbooks, and it’s the same answer you get from the Vrikshayurveda as well. Now, that’s not awful when you’ve grown up around it so you know the process, but need guidance to tackle specific problems in an orchard. Not great for when you’re reviving a thousand-year-old practice.
Now, we’re going to focus the rest of this piece on the practices of fermentation specifically in these texts, because we’re most interested in soil amending here, but I do want to point out this is just a very, very small part of Vrikshayurveda, and we could honestly do an entire series dedicated to the different things covered in literally thousands of pages of dense content that these books cover. Part of the reason I don’t want to is because a lot of it is very specific to India.
So we’ve chatted a bit at this point about Kunapajala, and as I said, we don’t have specific information about how to make it traditionally, but research has been ongoing to recreate these methods, and I’m going to give an example of one recipe tested that showed improved crop performance.6 2.5 parts fish devoid of scales, to 1 part powdered sesame oil cake, rice husk, molasses, and 8 parts cow urine, by weight. Boil the fish. Cool and mix these in a pot, close the lid, and allow to ferment, stirring twice a day. If you’re looking for more specific instructions, good luck. I saw at least four different recipes for Kunapajala, and some of them were significantly different, but this one had studies tied to it, so I went with that. The added benefit was that of the recipes, this one seemed to have the most ingredients we could come up with here in the US. Sesame oil cake and the rice husk will likely be the hardest, but if you grow some sunflowers and press the sunflower seeds for oil, I’m sure those would be sufficient. Rice husk could be substituted for another fibrous waste product, like grains.
Now, multiple researchers did extensive testing of the kunapajala’s macro and micro-content as it fermented, and what was interesting, is that depending on what you wanted to get out of it impacted when you wanted to use it. For example, nitrogen doubled from day zero to day 20, but by day 40 it had dropped back in half. Phosphorus, on the other hand, increased a little bit by day 20 and then doubled by day 40. Potassium doubled on day 20, and by day 40 had increased a little bit more.7
How could you leverage this for your benefit? You’d probably want to use the 20-day fermentation for crops in the vegetative growth stage and the 40-day for plants closer to flowering. You could use the same Kunapajala on the same plant later in the year for different reasons, which is pretty cool. Fungal growth also continued to grow the longer it fermented as well, suggesting it might make more sense to apply older batches to tree crops as well. Some folks also suggest fermenting for 60 days as well, however, we don’t have as much data on this.
Let’s talk about Kunapajala. It translates to ‘smell of death’, so yeah, maybe don’t do this one in the house. Studies have shown that not only is it effective as a fertilizer compared to simple manure, but in one study it beat inorganic fertilizers, with plants showing 10% height improvements to traditional fertilizers, 10% increased total leaf area, and 15% increases in root length. Again, this is in comparison to conventional fertilizers. When paired with Panchagavya, which we haven’t talked about, tomatoes grew 51.3% larger than the control and created 106% more total biomass.8
Now a variant of this, and by variant I mean it overlaps with other recipes of Kunapajala is Shasyagavya, which is the fermented mixture of cow dung, cow urine, vegetable waste, and water in 1:1:1:2 ratios, respectively.9 It is generally prepared by chopping and fermenting weeds in water along with cow dung and urine. Both of these are strained and then sprayed or treated like a drench, just like in KNF or JADAM, at a 10:1 ratio with water, so about 1.5 cups per gallon, sprayed weekly. In side-by-side testing, Kunapajala usually seemed to do better, but Shasyagavya had higher growth rates primarily with forbs, although that’s just anecdotal evidence from different studies and not something anyone went out to try and prove.10
To summarize: we have Kunapajala, which is fermented fish in piss with some starchy plants, which we use early on for younger plants to grow and the older strained stuff for bigger plants. Then we’ve got Skasyagavya, which is piss, shit, and vegetable waste, which is good for the bigger small plants, and then we’ve got Panchagavya.
Kunapajala has extreme variety, there are versions with milk and ghee and cow dung, and it still falls under the same broad category, but the constant is the fermented fish with urine; everything else seems to be fairly interchangeable, which again, makes me feel pretty okay with swapping in different cake and starches. One guy who was researching new methods decided to use rats instead of fish, so yeah, it’s a pretty wide window.
So let’s talk about panchagavya. First, it’s considered biodigested manure, which is a fancy way of saying microbes are fermenting it. There are a few of these, panchagavya being the most common, jeevamrutha, and beejamrutha to name the top three. I’m only bringing up panchagavya because it’s the most common and it would be odd to keep it out, but the recipe isn’t designed for the average farmer here in the US. It’s made of cow dung, cow urine, milk, curd, jaggery, ghee, banana, Tender coconut water, and water.11
I’m also gonna talk about jeevamrutha because it’s gonna sound real familiar to JADAM followers. It’s basically JLF, but slightly different. Getting a big 55-gallon barrel, add 11 pounds of cow dung, a handful of soil from your farm, 3 gallons of cow urine, 2 pounds of brown sugar, and 2 pounds of bean flour, and stir 3 times a day for 10 minutes for 4 days while keeping in a shaded place and a breathable lid. It’s ready after the 4 days and is only good for a few days after, and used at a 10:1 ratio.12,
Like KNF and JADAM, Vrikshayurveda has exploded into many different areas, from fertilizing to pest repellant to seed treatments, all in the early stages of being tested through scientific institutions. I think part of the reason we don’t hear much about them is that many folks interested in this stuff don’t have a lot of cow shit sitting around. But that’s the thing, the formulas are pretty loose around these, based on the research I’ve seen. And of course, we are just scratching the surface on this subject, we didn’t talk about Amrut Jal, a pest repellant, or any of the other biodigesters, and we didn’t even get into zero-budget natural farming.
The last thing I want to add to this conversation is that most of the testing these were for these methods separately, but one study put Panchagavya + Kunapajala together, and they were found to be best in better utilization of leaf nitrogen, efficient photosynthetic activity, and in improving yields. We’re only scratching the surface of this subject, not just in terms of us and the research, but even the folks just trying to figure this out in the field before academics get their hands on it.
If you’ve enjoyed this piece, which is equal to a 11-page chapter, of (so far) a 927-page book with 601 sources, you can support our work in a number of ways. The first is by sharing this article with folks you think would find it interesting. Second, you can listen to the audio version of this episode, #128, of the Poor Proles Almanac wherever you get your podcasts. Suppose you’d like to financially support the project, and get exclusive access to our limited paywalled content. In that case, you can become a paid subscriber on Substack or Patreon, which will both give you access to the paywalled content and in the case of Patreon, early access to the audio episodes as well.
Nene, Y L, “Kunapajala – A Liquid Organic Manure of Antiquity” Asian Agri-History: https://www.asianagrihistory.org/pdf/volume10/agri.pdf
https://indosphere.medium.com/vrikshayurveda-the-science-of-plant-life-5e91ffaad7fd
Zhang, Q., Gong, L., Abbas, T., Wu, D., He, D., & Di, H. (2022). Potato Fermented Fertilizer Modulates Soil Nitrification by Shift Niche of Functional Microorganisms to Increase Yield in North China. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1341972/v1
Ebel, R. (2020). Yield response of a polycropping system with maize to fermented foliar fertilizers. CIENCIA Ergo Sum, 27(3). https://doi.org/10.30878/ces.v27n3a8
Naresh, R. (2020). Effects of Kunapajala and Panchagavya on Nutrients Release, Crop Productivity and Soil Health. Asian Agri-History, 24(2), 147–161.
https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=5_jPTV_fvUQ
https://www.sdiarticle3.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Revised-ms_CJAST_49861_v1.pdf
https://ojs.pphouse.org/index.php/IJBSM/article/view/274
Nene, Y. (2017). A Critical Discussion on the Methods Currently Recommended to Support Organic Crop Farming in India. Asian Agri-History, 21(3), 267–285.
Ankad, G. M., Hiremath, J., Patil, R. T., Pramod, H. J., & Hegde, H. V. (2018). Nutrient analysis of Kunapa Jala and Pancha Gavya and their evaluation on germination of Ashwagandha and Kalamegha Seeds: A comparative study. Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine, 9(1), 13–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaim.2017.01.011
https://www.pphouse.org/upload_article/3_IJBSM_Sept_2012_Ali.pdf
Amareswari, P. U., & Sujathamma, P. (2014). Jeevamrutha as an alternative of chemical fertilizers in Rice Production. Agricultural Science Digest - A Research Journal, 34(3), 240. https://doi.org/10.5958/0976-0547.2014.01012.x