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Time Out visits First Agro Zero Pesticide farm

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First Agro

Walking through the 45-acre First Agro Farm is like eating your way througha fresh, crunchy salad. Naveen MV and Nameet M, who co-founded this zeropesticide commercial grower company with KN Prasad in 2010, encouragedus to pluck vegetables and crunch them – we took in the sweet aroma ofsage, picked a glistening leaf of purple basil and admired its heady tasteand sampled wild rocket. The heart of the salad bowl were the heirloomtomatoes – vines were laden with the world’s smallest pea cherry tomato, thelarger cherry one, the grape-shaped one, a teardrop one, a snow-white anda purple version.

We were 110 kilometers outside Bangalore, in Cauvery Valley, speaking tothe promoters of First Agro, which grows zero pesticide produce complyingwith the FAO/WHO’s Codex Alimentarius food safety standards. Naveen,who is the CEO, said, “What is important in this business is to have a deepunderstanding of entomology [the scientific study of insects] and Olericulture[the science of vegetable growing] so that you know how to use naturalmethods and bio-solutions to manage pests.” Nameet is the chief productionhead, who learnt all about growing vegetables and keeping pests at bay withnatural methods from horticultural growers in Canada, where he was acommercial pilot. COO Prasad has managed family farms in Karnataka forover a decade.

Nameet worked on an integrated pest and disease management systemwhere he uses a “combination of neem oil, beneficial insects, beneficialmicrobes, garlic-chili spray, pheromone insect traps and companion plants”.“We are able to manage about 90 per cent of the common pest issues inagriculture,” he said. The farm also uses the drip-irrigated method to providewater to their fields.

Being commercial growers, the three brothers have expanded their businessto the retail and hospitality sectors. First Agro supplies to restaurants suchas The Glass House and Caperberry and hotels such as The Ritz-Carlton, The Oberoi and JW Marriott. In retail, their produce isavailable with BigBasket.com, HyperCity and FoodHall, among others.

Their biggest challenge has been to get Bangaloreans to think about foodsafety. “When we do promotional campaigns in malls, people tell us that theyhad no clue about these issues,” said Naveen. “We tell them how food isgrown using pesticide or what GMOs are. Slowly, awareness is seeping in.”

By Bijal Vachharajani on June 06 2014 8.10am

Tags: Restaurants & Cafés, Features, Organic Farming, First Agro Farm, Cauvery Valley

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