What is ‘Life’ and ‘Living’? All living organisms, from bacteria to plants and humans, regardless of its form, share a common set of features: they are made of cells which are the basic structural and functional units of life, use energy through metabolism, maintain an internal balance (homeostasis), grow and reproduce, respond to its environment, and can evolve over generations. These characteristics together distinguish living systems from non‑living matter or inanimate objects like rocks.
Living systems produce offspring, either asexually from a single parent or sexually from two parents. They pass on genetic material (DNA or RNA), which carries instructions that determine traits in the next generation. Populations of living organisms can undergo genetic change over generations, a process known as evolution. Through mechanisms like natural selection, life forms develop adaptations that improve their ability to survive and reproduce in specific environments.
Biologically however, the single most important “goal” of all living things is to survive long enough to reproduce and pass on their genetic information to the next generation. Survival (getting enough energy, avoiding harm, maintaining the body) serves this deeper objective of continuing the lineage of the organism or species. This is its basic function.
From bacteria that divide in two to plants that set seed and animals that produce offspring, reproduction is a universal feature of life.
Because the “goal” is ongoing reproduction, species are continually shaped by natural selection to better fit their environments. Adaptations in morphology, physiology, and behaviour — from drought tolerance in crops to camouflage in animals — are all strategies that ultimately support survival and reproduction.
“Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage, against the dying of the light” – Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas, the well-known Welsh Poet penned these lines in 1947 and first published in 1951, and they capture the very essence of what we call ‘Life’.
All living organisms rage against the dying of the light.
That struggle has been playing out for 4.5 billion years, long before humans entered the story. Research leads us to believe that our planet Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago from cosmic dust under extreme heat, and after it cooled enough for liquid water and a stable atmosphere to form, a “primordial soup” created the conditions for life to emerge some 4.2 to 3.7 billion years ago. Simple inorganic molecules (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen) combined under energy sources like lightning, UV radiation, hydrothermal heat, or volcanic activity to form organic compounds such as amino acids and nucleotides. Over time, these molecules self-organized into self-replicating systems. The earliest confirmed life forms were microscopic, single-celled organisms living in water. When cyanobacteria (a green blue algae that releases oxygen) evolved around 2.4 billion years ago and began photosynthesizing, oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere, paving the way for more complex, energy-intensive life forms and eventually the first animals evolved roughly 800 million years ago. Primates emerged much earlier — some 55 to 90 million years ago — and from them, true apes appeared around 25 million years ago, with the lineage splitting into gibbons and great apes about 16-18 million years ago. The final divergence was about 8-9 million years ago, and humans became a distinct separate species about 300,000 years ago.
Plant life has an even longer history than animal life, beginning with simple algae in water roughly 700 million to 1 billion years ago and only reaching the trees, shrubs, and root crops we know today through a series of major evolutionary steps over hundreds of millions of years.
They started as simple, soft aquatic organisms with no roots, stems, or leaves, and took the momentous step from water onto land around 470 million years ago, starting as simple forms like mosses and liverworts that reproduced by spores rather than seeds, and after another 50 million years, they evolved, developing vascular tissue for transporting water and nutrients, allowing them to grow taller and develop true stems, roots, and leaves. This enabled the rise of the first trees by around 380-400 million years ago. Around 380 million years ago, seed ferns developed the first seeds, a major advance that let plants survive in drier conditions unsuitable for spore-based reproduction.
The most transformative step came around 140-125 million years ago when flowering plants evolved, introducing seeds enclosed in fruit and co-evolving with early pollinators like bees. These make up the vast majority of plant species available today, including nearly all flowering trees, shrubs, vegetables, and tuber-forming plants such as potatoes and turmeric.
Finally, grasses evolved relatively recently, around 60 million years ago. Tuber and root crops (existed for millions of years, however human cultivation and domestication of these plants, along with grains such as wheat, barley, rice, and millet, only began around 8,000 to 13,000 years ago, marking the dawn of agriculture.
The reason for the history lesson is to give us a sense of perspective of how long it took for us to evolve into what we are today.
Mankind, however, has gone beyond the need to merely survive. Human communities first started as a survival mechanism – for compared to the natural predators that roamed the world, human had little or no defence. Human life forms adapted their genetic profile to greater use of the brain and intelligence that allowed them to adapt and develop tools to dominate its environment. With this domination, life’s basic functions of survival and genetic adaption were no longer required as evolutionary criteria.
This intelligence also led to interference with the natural process of many of the life forms and life systems that humans required for their survival.
It started with the domestication of animals and then to their other food source – the land.
As food security increased, and the tools that mankind invented become more lethal, we became the greatest predators, despite our physical shortcomings.
With greater food security, mankind fulfilled its basic living goal and reproduced in such numbers that food produced by the methodology plant life systems followed were thought to be inadequate to fulfil its needs.
So, the land was cleared and mono-cropping introduced with seed selection being done by Mankind as opposed to by nature.
The environmental balance required to maintain life, in all its forms, took 4.5 billion years to evolve and interlink, in which each organism has its part to play in keeping the balance and allowing all their interconnected species to grow, adapt and reproduce.
The problem with monocropping is that it strips the soil of the specific nutrients the single crop repeatedly draws down. Wheat, for example, is a heavy nitrogen feeder, absorbing around 128-200 kg of nitrogen per hectare along with substantial potassium and phosphorus to build grain protein and support high biomass. Since it cannot fix its own nitrogen, repeated wheat cultivation steadily depletes soil nitrogen reserves and requires ongoing nitrogen fertilization to sustain yields. Synthetic fertilizers, especially nitrogen-based ones, that are required due to the depletion, further acidify the soil, disrupt its natural pH and nutrient balance, and starve the microbial food web, since unused nutrients leach away rather than cycling through soil life, reducing beneficial fungi, earthworms, and overall biodiversity and eliminating the diverse root systems and seasonal cover that normally build organic matter and prevent erosion.
With mono cropping, species-specific pests and diseases build up unchecked, forcing greater reliance on pesticides, which compounds the damage to soil biology and water quality. The cumulative effect is a shift from soil as a living, self-renewing ecosystem into a degraded, input-dependent medium that needs ever more chemical inputs just to sustain the same yields.
The damage to the environment and the fragile ecosystem that has been built over billions of years is in danger of being destroyed by our arrogance and incompetence.
We need to return to our roots, both figuratively and literally, by studying forest ecosystems where below the canopy, there are multiple layers of trees, plants, shrubs, grasses and tubers that create an ecosystem that is self-sustaining. We need to go back to multi-cropping with zero tillage and zero chemical fertilisers.
It can be done.
Masanobu Fukuoka, an acclaimed Japanese farmer and philosopher, trained as a microbiologist and agricultural scientist specialising in Plant Pathology, and during WWII worked at the Kōchi Prefecture agricultural experiment station on farming research and food production, before moving away from ‘western’ farming methods. He created a natural farming system that rejuvenates soil by stopping mechanical and chemical disturbance and letting plant–animal–microbial cycles rebuild organic matter, structure, and biodiversity, thereby creating a stable habitat where the basic functions of “life” (energy use, growth, reproduction, response, evolution) can flourish. Fukuoka’s method is often summarized in four practical rules: no ploughing, no chemical fertilizers or compost, no weeding by tillage or herbicides, and no chemical pesticides. These rules deliberately reduce human interference so that roots, soil fauna, and natural plant succession can rebuild the soil’s structure and fertility. He articulated and validated his natural farming method in his book ‘One Straw Revolution’ that was published in 1975.
The key to going back to Nature’s way for farming is its extraordinarily sophisticated system into seeds that allows them to “know” exactly when to germinate — without any human help. Seeds don’t germinate immediately after falling from a plant. Instead, they enter dormancy. This means they go to sleep and remain inactive until a set of environmental signals confirms it is the right time and place to sprout. This also prevents all seeds from germinating at the same time, reducing competition and improving the group’s collective survival. Seeds track temperature, moisture, light and soil gases and break their dormancy when conditions suit its survival. Different plants require different triggers to remove their ‘dormancy lock’, cold weather followed by warmth; rains; wildfires, and physical abrasion. Once it is lifted, germination is a simple process.
This entire system, from dormancy, environmental sensing, and staggered germination, is the result of millions of years of natural selection, fine-tuned so that each species germinates precisely when its local climate offers the best chance of survival and reproduction. This system offers some of the most powerful lessons for natural farming, and that farming works best when it mimics rather than fights natural processes.
Modern industrial agriculture typically forces germination through synthetic chemicals and controlled environments. Natural farming, by contrast, recognizes dormancy as a feature, not a bug. Allowing seeds to go through their natural dormancy cycle — cold stratification in winter-grown crops, wet-dry cycles in monsoon crops — produces stronger seedlings because the embryo is fully prepared.
Nature never leaves soil bare. Its soil seed bank, layers of dormant seeds waiting for the right signal, only functions in undisturbed, microbe-rich soil. Industrial tillage destroys this bank. Seeds evolved to read temperature, moisture, and light as seasonal signals. The practical lesson for natural farming is bioregional seed selection — choosing or breeding varieties whose dormancy triggers match local climate rhythms precisely. A seed variety from Punjab’s wheat belt may have different stratification needs than one from Madhya Pradesh’s Malwa plateau. Indigenous seed varieties preserved by farming communities encode this local climate memory over centuries of selection.
This is exactly why heirloom seeds are so important for our future food and environmental security.
India’s traditional multi-crop farming systems represent one of the world’s most sophisticated indigenous approaches to food security, ecological resilience, and soil health — developed over millennia of observation and refinement. Its three-season rotation ensured continuous land use without exhausting soil, as different crops drew on different nutrient profiles and soil depths.
However, many communities in India followed nature’s way. The most iconic multi-crop system among them is Barahnaja (बारह अनाज, “twelve grains”) from the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand — one of the most sophisticated polyculture systems in the world. Rather than growing 12 crops sequentially, Barahnaja involves sowing 20 or more native varieties at the same time in the same field — including cereals, lentils, oilseeds, millets, vegetables, and medicinal herbs. All are sown together at the monsoon onset and harvested at different times across the season.
This same multi-crop logic appears across India’s regions:
- The Kurwa (Paharia community) in Jharkhand’s Rajmahal Hills: up to ~40 crops; cereals, pulses, vegetables over multi-year plots.
- The Kurichia tribe in Wayanad, Kerala’s Ponamkuthu: oilseeds, cucurbits, and minor millets in shifting cultivation.
- Bhuj/Rammolin Kachchh, Gujarat: 7-crop system: mixed field crops adapted to arid conditions.
- Deccan/Central India: mixed cereal-pulse intercropping: sorghum/bajra mixed with tur dal, groundnut, or horsegram — no one crop dominates.
These systems encoded deep ecological knowledge. Crops were selected and arranged to fulfil specific roles: Nitrogen fixers (legumes) alongside nitrogen consumers (cereals). Tall canopy crops providing shade for low-growing, shade-tolerant crops. Deep-rooted crops accessing subsoil moisture alongside shallow-rooted crops using topsoil. Early-maturing crops providing food during the hunger season before main crops are ready.
This is essentially what we now call functional biodiversity — every plant playing an ecological role.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s–70s systematically replaced these polycultures with high-yielding monocultures of wheat and rice, dismantling centuries of seed diversity. Subsidized PDS supply of uniform rice and wheat made communities progressively abandon their multi-crop traditions. Even after India achieved food security and the need to continue its destructive methodologies no longer existed, our policy makers continued with the same policies, and have poisoned vast tracts of the country’s land.
It is not too late to reverse track. The Joint declaration of the BRICS Ministers of Agriculture on 13th June, 2026 in Indore, Madhya Pradesh recognised the role of farmers as custodians of traditional knowledge and seed heritage; and also recognised the importance of regenerative agriculture.
The production differential between monocropping and multi-cropping is one of the most well-researched and debated questions in modern agronomy. The standard scientific measure for comparing the two systems is the Land Equivalent Ratio (LER); i.e. how much monoculture land would you need to produce the same total output as one unit of multi-cropped land? Research generally finds multi-cropping LERs between 1.2 and 2.0+, meaning monocultures need 20–100% more land to match the total output of a well-designed multi-crop system. Not all multi-crop systems outperform monocultures equally. However, when the planting design is local and properly planned, it will always win.
Monoculture wins on single-crop peak yield in a good year with full inputs. Multi-cropping wins on virtually every other dimension: total land productivity, economic returns, soil health, climate resilience, nutritional diversity, and input efficiency; the most important considerations for small and marginal farmers in rainfed dryland regions.
Can we accept that nature knows best and go back to our roots?