February 12, 2025

Orange You Glad I Found a Bike?

Today I started another day of the Green Foundation work trip with a bike ride. This is my first bike ride in India, and please do not fret, I am referring to a bicycle. I found a discarded bike in the Hotel Aditya Residency, collecting dust while conveniently and tantalizingly displayed alongside an air pump and chain lube. Knowing that this bike has been waiting for me, I fixed it up quickly and decided it was meant to be. It was a mountain bike with fat tires and nice front fork suspension, something I’ve never ridden but makes perfect sense for Pandhurna, Madhya Pradesh.

Some roads were skinny, and some were just rock, but all roads lead towards something interesting: but never to Rome. I made my way to the Gotmar Mela Bridge, which was an epic moment. I found three other bridges along the way, and nothing was really different about this one, except it had been just about the only thing I’d seen on Google Maps the week prior when attempting to discern what new area of India I was to be shipped off to by the whims of GCIL.
Today was one of our many days spent interviewing regenerative farmers back to back to back. We sat in the home of two brothers, both farmers out of familial obligation: one an electrical engineering student who went part-time when their father passed and agriculture became priority. He had big dreams of solar panels and energy for his farm which was beautiful to see. Here I had fresh milk, real fresh milk. I am a big milk person, so this was a glorious moment. I was told by the rest of my group, who probably just wanted to keep me far away from any udders, that unpasteurized milk is incredibly dangerous for some reason or another. Boiling the milk is the next best thing for food safety. India is sweet, and so sugar is added, and suddenly the white coffee at the dorms makes a smidge more sense to me.
It’s hard not to be hungry with 1.5-hour interviews, so I eat again whenever snacking arises, this time it’s roasted peanuts with jaggery on the side. This was a delectable combo, and I do in fact have a sweet tooth, so by hour five of interviewing, I was eating just the jaggery in organically sweet bites. You can’t really do this with honey or granulated sugar or cane sugar or molasses or even Splenda, and thus the jaggery production plant made a smidge more sense to me.

We ended the day driving into the dying sun, trying our very best to steal just one more story within our day. We ended up at the model farm of Chinta, who ecstatically provided a beautiful tour around the farm, with special stops at the enormous spinach leaves and aromatic gobi. With so many extra friends, so many hands passing oranges, and friendly faces pointing out the farm’s well and this bean or that lime, this tour followed the common theme of a small community entirely uplifted by a farmer’s success. In this case, it was Chinta and his two brothers and three daughters, though once again even more people joined the tour mob for reasons indeterminable to me.
We sat at their home, upon tarpaulin upon concrete, in the very same spot captured in the photos Chinta shared with us. I remember their house had three roofing styles under one segment: wood, terracotta, and tin. The tin, I’m sure, had rocks resting atop, as tin roofs seem to, which actually has way more functionality than you would possibly think and never ceases to intrigue me.

Chinta then showed us photos from when Green Foundation came and assisted in packaging his oranges for an export deal to Japan and the USA, as he had the most organic of oranges. He also had the orangest of oranges, and no one else in this region had orange oranges like his. At this point, I truly didn’t understand whether oranges were meant to be orange or green or half-baked in the orange sun: yellow and green such as all 57 oranges I ate during my time in Madhya Pradesh.

When Chinta swiped too far in his camera roll, I saw his daughter and her birthday cake in that same location again. The endless layering of regenerative farming and its impacts spread bare before me in this new light of a family home, with a row of three brothers with three daughters behind them, and then three university students beside me with three cows behind me. Crowded around the green orange oranges, this family stated that the acreage of their land is divided on government papers only, which brought a breadth to my exhausted smile that only deepened when we were handed a full bag of orange-yellow-green oranges To-Go.

By,
Kelsey