Manasvini Tyagi

Manasvini Tyagi is the founder of Earthen Routes and is dedicated to bringing the benefits of natural farming to cities. She holds a degree in textile designing together with permaculture certification, and her farm and teaching profile describes her as a food forest designer and permaculture teacher.

She has run Earthen Routes Community Farm on the ACTREC campus of the Tata Memorial Centre in Kharghar, Navi Mumbai, since 2019, having first volunteered at the site in 2012. As she describes it, the farm mainly follows permaculture principles and implements a multilayer multi-cropping method for optimising the space, and its produce goes to paediatric cancer patients.

Getting the farm established was not straightforward. She has said that funds and finding a gardener were the biggest challenges while setting up, and that for a year and a half there was no gardener at all and the farm relied entirely on volunteers. The site now invites people to explore the farm and to take part in workshops and volunteering sessions, and that combination of growing, teaching and volunteer work runs through her practice: urban permaculture, food forest design and the everyday business of keeping a community farm going.