From Her Hands
to His Harvest
Keerthi Organics began with my grandmother. It was her life's work.
In the 1940s, at 13, my grandmother, the late Keerthi Veettil Janaki Amma married Kunchi Krishna Panicker of Kondappurathu Veedu and moved from Lakkidi to Vadakkanthara in Palakkad. Even after relocating, her mind stayed on her family's paddy land in Lakkidi. She took charge of managing those fields directly, traveling back and forth regularly between Palakkad and Lakkidi to supervise the farming.
In those decades, farming was done without tractors, power tillers, or synthetic fertilizers. Everything depended on manual labour, traditional soil management, monsoon cycles, and patience. The rice from those fields fed her children, extended family, and relatives in Palakkad for decades. Even when chemical fertilizers spread through local farming in the late 1990s, her approach remained grounded in the old, natural ways she had always known.
Her approach remained grounded in the old, natural ways she had always known.
After completing 20 years in the Indian Air Force and returning home, taking care of her land felt like the natural choice. I combined the inherited paddy fields with land bought from my cousins.
But the soil was in bad shape. Years of chemical fertilisers had stripped its natural life. My first five seasons were pure loss. Most people told me to give up. But military discipline doesn't let you retreat.
I turned to what Janaki Amma had done. I prepared Jeevamritham and Panchagavyam using traditional farm inputs - just the way the elders taught.
Slowly, life returned to the mud. Today, cultivating our paddy fields using Jeevamritham and natural inputs is simply our way of carrying forward what Janaki Amma started. Keerthi Organics is our effort to keep her land active and continue producing the same clean, honest rice she grew for our family.
Keerthi Organics carries her name and her methods forward - one harvest at a time.
