Originally reported and written in July 2022, this story has been republished as part of our archival content.

In Karnataka’s Kepu village, 50 km southeast of Mangaluru, lies a 50-acre organic farm that is around 200 years old. Through the years, this land has seen a transformation — from a plot of green for one family to one that a confluence of cultures visit.

Partha Varanashi, the sixth-generation owner of the land, says his family has always held a soft corner for agriculture. “In 1960, my grandfather started a farmer’s society called CampCo. My parents were also always into the study of agriculture, with my dad doing his PhD in Microbiology and my mom doing hers in Macrobiology.”

Through his growing years, Partha, who was born on this land itself, has seen it evolve in more ways than one.

While the Varanashi family had been welcoming guests and relatives to their farm for the last 30 years, they had never done so commercially until an incident got them thinking.

Around 2006, a few of Partha’s friends had come to the farm to visit him. One of them told him that he knew a girl who had just completed Class 12, and was clueless about what to do next. When she heard about Partha’s farm, she asked if she could come over and spend a few weeks just to get a sense of how things functioned on a farm.

“She spent two weeks on our land and fell so in love with agriculture and organic farming that she went on to study horticulture engineering,” he recalls.

This got Partha thinking. “If farm life could inspire just one person, other city folk would also love this way of life. It could be a good break from the daily hustle,” he says.

The family took this proposal to the Karnataka Tourism Department as a way to promote agritourism, and decided to launch their farm stay in 2014.

Partha also notes that the idea of inviting volunteers came to him in 2007, while he was pursuing a degree in Molecular Biology in Australia. “Over there, there is a concept called WWOOFing,........

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