From this past February toward an approaching national election, protests by farmers of India’s breadbasket provinces of Punjab and Haryana election demand, among other reforms, for subsidies to sufficiently cover the high costs and debts of agriculture. In India, where 60 percent of livelihoods depend on the success of a crop, the urgency motivating thousands of bodies to occupy roads and railroads in the march toward Delhi can be equally underscored by the bodies that cannot. Farmer suicides, totaling 48 per day from 1995 to 2018 and 30 per day over the current political term, joined additionally by the likely- underreported 96 extreme heat deaths last summer, can attest to the precarity of our inherently planetary systems of agriculture when entangled with increasing climate, market, and political volatility.

Heat and stifling can be felt commonly between the anxieties imposed upon farmers and the smog inhaled from acres of burning rice stubble each fall. After the Kharif harvest each October, farmers rush to clear rice paddies for wheat in a little over a week, a timeframe constrained along all dimensions of this open system, including dwindling monsoon rains, new restrictions ignoring heavy reliance on groundwater introduced by industrialized agriculture, and the long growing seasons of the water-intensive monocultures of rice and wheat farmers must plant each year to even attempt to recover rising costs through insufficient subsidies.

For populations along the Indo-Gangetic plain, water and its storage have long remained the lifeblood and heart of agriculture and civilization, holding even greater reverence at the overlap between the Indus and Ganges river basins that includes Punjab, Haryana, and Delhi. Reviving vernacular techniques from along these rivers manifested by materials with enhanced thermal performance and sequestration potential through production or cogeneration processes using agricultural waste, infrastructure and programs around water, built by and for farmers, are aimed toward addressing rice stubble burning at appropriate local and planetary scales, beginning by distributing availability of monsoon rains across crop types, farms, and time. Coupled with the reform of policies farmers are now protesting, the enduring system hopes to ingrain support for the lives and livelihoods involved in India’s system of agriculture.