Venkateshwar Talla vividly recalls his first night on the piece of land that is now GreenAcres. 

“I pitched my tent, whose roof opened out to the sky. It was a full moon night, and by around 4 am, the sky filled up with stars. It was beautiful, and I thought to myself, ‘How can I get city people to experience this?’” 

That night was the precursor to Venkateshwar’s idea of a farmstay model, encouraging campers to sign up for a night of stargazing, enveloped by a carpet of green, the result of years of organic farming practices. 

His purchase of the land back in the late 90s was a spur-of-the-moment decision, a “crazy impulse”. 

“While working in the IT sector in the United States, a few of my friends back home in India came up with the idea of collective farming. I liked it. So, six of us got together, acquired a 30-acre piece of land 60 km from Hyderabad city near Yadagirigutta in 1999,” he shares. Each stakeholder had five acres to himself; a love for nature, and overlapping memories of trips to their native village farms, bonded them. 

Venkateshwar was thrilled with his buy-in, but a year later, when he visited the land, he found it lying in abeyance, neglected and overgrown with thorny bushes. His friends’ response to his quizzical looks was, ‘We realised farming is not our cup of tea.’ But Venkateshwar saw potential; he bought six more acres to add to his five, moved back to India for good in 2003, intending to harness the potential of the land in positive ways. 

For three years, the techie and his family lived........

© The Better India