The Future of Mango

A cool late winter night walking within the mango thicket, glimpses of stars are visible through the leaves of intertwining branches, about 30 feet above my head. The heady aroma is a sweet and sour one, flowers, of nearly 500 mango trees, at various stages of their opening. Over the course of the next few months, cool will turn to hot and dry, followed by muggy, so muggy that you'll be soaked in your own sweat by merely existing, forget any physical work. As we dread the arrival of the summer... heat, flies, mosquitoes; Manish points out the silver lining, it also brings the mango! The sweet game changer that makes everything else not just forgivable, even forgettable.

2025 April. A conversation between Dada and myself reveals a count of 7 trees with fruit - 3 kesar, 2 hapus, 1 rajapuri. I pause. And take it all in. We're the farm that has flooded Bombay with mango. Not once. Every summer since 2013.

In the early days, some of you collected your boxes from the family flat in Bombay, lead there by the aroma in the stairwell, arriving to a floor not of tile, but of mango, neatly occupying every square inch, on a bed of rice straw. Some of you found us at dinner and drinks with friends, conversations eventually leading to the season's best, which lead you to this farm.

Back in 2013, you knew and seeked only Hapus. We've slipped other varieties into your box until you asked for the Surprise Me box - a seasonal mix of the 11 odd varieties on the farm. Tons have left the farm for Bombay. Some of you have also traveled the mangoes across India including to the Himalaya, others to your family in Europe and the Americas. Much has been consumed right here, by humans, animals, ants, birds, soil. By end season, our clothes are stained with juices of the fruit and the land has turned into one massive fermentary... everyone sweating mango - the cows, the humans, the soil.

Climate change is here to stay. Our slow, sun heavy summers are becoming hectic - scorching moments burning leaves of trees, erratic lightening storms bringing rain and fast-moving winds. This is true for all our seasons, regular patterns have become unpredictable and clear seasonal divisions have blurred. Temperatures are reaching new limits and natural rhythms are changing. And in synch, mango trees are readjusting. Today, this is expressed by sporadic and scanty flowering. There are unnatural ways around this, which still brings us fruit in the markets. Specifically, hormonal triggers can induce flowering in the trees, the same kind of thing we sapiens have done to ensure our milk supply. But, you know that's not how this farm rolls.

So what does all this mean for the future of mango? Grafted mango trees are some of the most delicate trees. They like routine and discipline. They like the warmth in the summer, a monsoon that comes in June, and a winter with a significant number of and constant cold nights. That said, Nature holds incredible intelligence, after all, she is the Mother. There is a chance that trees adapt to more erratic weather patterns over time.

Interesting when you think it all through... the stakes of our modern lifestyle are slowly beginning to unveil, and it includes some of our most loved foods.