About 45 minutes from Chikmagalur town in an area called Aldur sits Kerehaklu – home to coffee bushes as far as the eye can see in the birthplace of Indian coffee. The Thipaiahs have had Kerehaklu in the family since 1953. Pranoy Thipaiah is the fifth generation to be running it along with his dad. We spoke to him to understand the evolving coffee culture in India, what it takes to run an agricultural enterprise and the challenges that come with it.

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More and more, people want coffee directly from the source in what is known as the third wave of coffee, shifting the focus of coffee consumption to single-origin, high-quality beans. To Pranoy, ‘It’s first and foremost a motivating factor to know that people want coffee, and they want good coffee now. If you look at places around the world, the countries which produce coffee aren’t necessarily drinkers of it; the culture is elsewhere. There’s a lot of colonial hangovers in that sense. For example, when you talk about Italian coffee, what is Italian coffee? Italy doesn’t grow coffee. They roast coffee and they drink cappuccinos. Same way you talk about Belgian chocolate. There’s no chocolate from Belgium! It’s Congolese – colonial cacao that they’ve used and processed very well. So, the shifting paradigm is very recent but also fits in with the wave of elevation of food and beverages in India in general. There’s a lot of pride in us being producers.’

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There is something very measured and deliberate about Pranoy – a composure well beyond his 27 years, despite which his commitment manages to shine through – not just to the coffee but to the land itself and everything on it, under it, feeding from it. ‘If I had to describe it in a bracket, I would say it’s a coffee plantation but there’s also such intricate pieces of land within it where we grow citrus and pepper and jackfruit alongside coffee.’

His calm may be a direct upshot of having grown up tucked away from creature comforts like getting some chips from the shop next door. Pranoy learnt instead to respect the land and remain curious about it. Even after all these years, it manages to surprise him. His enthusiasm is unwavering, regardless of whether he describes finding paw prints of tigers in the estate or making new discoveries about soil health, ‘We have these intricate mycorrhizal networks under the soil which bind roots and help plants communicate. It was amazing. We don’t know anything about that, and it was easy then to put chemicals in the soil, but we don’t do that anymore because of these networks.’

Naturally, a lot of our conversation revolved around climate change – undisputedly the biggest challenge to agriculture everywhere, with coffee being no exception. ‘People don’t realise that when you’re feeling a heat wave in the city, it’s 10x worse in the hills because your crops are affected. It’s not the fact that you have to turn your fan up a notch, but plants are stressed and possibly dying… You could lose your yield for that year.

‘To give you context, we had intense rains for about 6 weeks in November-December, which were completely unseasonal and threw us off completely. We had to think on our feet a lot. On the other spectrum, we had forest fires two weeks ago. You have to prepare yourself mentally because when you’re secluded and really attached to your land, you start taking things personally.  But you can’t. It’s something out of your control. It’s an ever-changing dynamic which is going to get unpredictable more often.’

It also can’t be easy running a plantation, which shares most of its borders with the Bhadra Reserve Forest. ‘With that we’re dealing with a lot of parameters out of our control. Although it’s probably fair to say we’re agriculturists, all of us have been focused on conservation in one way or another. There are no fences separating us from the forest and we welcome it. Yes, sometimes that means our plants are damaged, but it means that the food webs are balanced; that the flowers are pollinated naturally by birds and bees.’

He describes a raging porcupine issue with Kerehaklu’s pepper as ‘an arms race between the porcupines and my dad, where both sides are constantly out-maneuvering the other’. They estimate that about 85-90% of their pepper vines in the last four years to these devious rodents. Elephants come and go as they please and help themselves to the plantation’s jackfruit and papaya; bats chomp on their avocados; and the estate’s visitors include leopards and the occasional tiger. But the Thipaiahs remain stoic. Pranoy laughs, ‘Coexistence comes at a price. We’re vying for the same resources as animals, but I think there’s enough to share and go around. This is the land – it’s their land too.’

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What, then, keeps him going? ‘The key to agriculture now is that you can’t react to things; you have to be very proactive. That’s where the beauty of Kerehaklu for me comes in – it’s the coming together of traditional and handed-down intuition, experience and knowledge with modern advancements which are necessary.

‘For me, it’s about leaving a legacy. It’s been so many generations of individuals applying themselves and often their personalities to this bit of land. That’s what I want to do; not because it’s expected of me but because I genuinely believe that it’s the most fulfilling life I can have.’

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