One of the last organic village in Bhutan

                                                   A view of our family's last paddy fields
                                                                                                Photo Courtesy: Indra Parsad Dahal

I wonder how many more purely organic farms have been left in Bhutan but I am quite confident that this view is definitely one among few. I come from a village called Maugaon (Lhayul), under Sarpang district. Here, agriculture is done with all conventional methods and everything is purely organic. People stack piles of manure, mostly cow dung throughout the year to use as and when required in their farms. "This practice has been the same for at least a century," is what I have heard from my dad who is now a very old man.
But recently with  new rules and Act for pasture lands that the government has passed and implemented, people of my village have minimised the rearing of cattle, leading to the quantity of manure drastically decreasing. This has a direct impact on the productivity scale, and so the production scale for each house has gone down at least by three folds.
Now, the biggest question is: "was the decision made by the government about pasture land wise?". Government officials have argued that large number of cattle eat everything available in forest and destroy them. My question to them is: "if the above statement was true than why do the forests across Bhutan still remain green despite our fore-fathers rearing hundreds of cattle and other domesticated animals?". In fact, same greenery was seen the very next season and thereafter. The truth is that as the cattle grazed on the rich plants and grasses, they leave behind pure organic manure which helps other plants and grass to grow for the next season. Indeed, the cow and the grass share symbiotic relationship which we have failed to understand.
The biggest worry that lies ahead is that should these laws continue to be implemented, people may lose hopes of rearing large number of cattle, which helped farmers to produce large quantities of organic manure. Should we take a step back and resume the conventional practice and scale up the production like that of the past? If our answer is no, then our farmers will slowly switch to inorganic manure and the proposition or dream of becoming a 100 % organic country would be a history. Let us be wise and think twice. The future of our nation lies in what we do today.