Growing up in our village, I never saw a single crop stretching all the way to the horizon like you do in farming documentaries. Our fields, fields always looked like patches. Wheat in one strip. Mustard in another. A row of vegetables along the edge. A few fruit trees near the well that nobody had even planned for.
As a child, I thought this was just how farming looked. A little messy, a little all over the place. It took me years to understand it was a choice, made on purpose, every single season.
Papa never grew just one thing, and neither did my uncles. I remember asking him once why he did not just grow whatever crop was selling the highest price that year. He looked at me like I had asked something a little silly. Because prices change, beta, he said. Because rain does not always come on time. Because one disease can wipe out one crop and leave everything else standing.
He was not trying to have his best possible season. He was trying to make sure there would be a next one.
I have seen what happened to farmers around our village who put everything into a single crop, chasing that year's best price. When the monsoon came late, they lost almost everything at once. When every other farmer had the same idea and the mandi flooded with the same crop, the price fell right when they finally had something to sell. One bad season, and there was nothing left underneath them.
Our mixed field was the cushion. If the wheat had a rough year, the mustard usually did not. If vegetable prices crashed in the mandi that week, the fruit trees were still quietly doing their own thing on their own schedule. No single failure could take down everything Papa and Chacha had built at once. Even in the years I remember being hard, our house never felt like it was one bad monsoon away from disaster.
I did not understand back then that this same instinct runs through so much of how people around us live. The shopkeeper who sells five different things instead of betting the whole shop on one. The family that keeps some savings as gold and some in the bank, instead of putting it all into one relative's sure thing business idea. Nobody in our family ever sat through a lecture on diversification. They just watched what happened to the one uncle in the extended family who put everything into a single deal and lost it all in one season.
There is a harder part of this that took me years to notice, long after I had left the village. Growing different varieties meant Papa almost never had his best possible year. If he had put everything into whichever crop turned out to be the winner that season, some years he would have earned more than he actually did. He gave up that ceiling, on purpose, every single year, in exchange for never hitting the floor.
Most of us, especially once we leave the village and start working in cities, get trained to chase the ceiling instead. Bet big. Go all in. Maximise the upside. Papa was playing a longer game than any single season could ever measure. He had watched enough years go by to know that the person who avoids the worst year usually ends up ahead of the person who chased the best one, once you count enough years together.
I think about this every time I am tempted to put everything behind one bet because it looks like the obvious winner right now. Papa never had the luxury of pretending he could predict the monsoon. He just made sure that whatever the weather decided to do, some part of the field would still be standing when it was over.
~Vazhi
P.S. If someone in your family still keeps a mixed field, or a mixed set of businesses, just in case, ask them why sometime. The answer usually goes back further than they remember.