Leaving behind corporate careers, two brothers returned to their ancestral village to revive the land through regenerative farming
At the farm, native Gir cows play a central role in sustaining soil health. Valued not just for their milk but for their dung and urine, they provide the natural inputs used to enrich the land, making conscious cattle-rearing the heart of regenerative farming practices. Pics/Nasrin Modak Siddiqi
After a night’s pitstop in Pune, we drove 138 km southeast towards Solapur, cruising through the flat expanse of the Deccan plateau. The two-lane highway was flanked by fields that stretched into the horizon. Closer to Indapur, the vast Ujani Dam backwaters on the Bhima River spread out like a lake, in parts, running parallel to the road. A striking contrast of blue and green turned the highway into a moving postcard of Maharashtra’s countryside.
Two hours later, we turned into narrow lanes that led to Bhodani. The landscape grew quieter, dotted with sugarcane, banana groves, and native trees swaying in the breeze. The village bustled with its own rhythm — mud houses and tiled roofs sitting alongside newer brick homes, children cycling down dusty paths, and the occasional bullock cart ambling by.
A little further, the heart of the village opens into the biodiverse farmlands of the Two Brothers Organic Farms. Here, the scene changes once again: a patchwork of crops, food forests with mango, guava, and jamun trees, and neat fields nourished by traditional mulching. Border trees rise tall like guardians, and the hum of bees mingles with the sounds of cattle from the sheds. It’s a living canvas of regenerative farming, where every patch of soil tells a story of revival and resilience.
Brothers Satyajit (L) and Ajinkya Hange carrying forward the legacy of farming, rooted in ancient wisdom and everyday sustainability. Pic/TBOF
On paper, the Hange brothers were destined for white-collar success. Satyajit, with a degree in Economics and an MBA from Pune, worked for nearly a decade across finance firms like Kotak, Citicorp, and DBS. His younger brother, Ajinkya, graduated in computer science, completed his MBA at Indira College, and found himself in the banking world with HDFC and HSBC. Farming, they were told, was “a failure’s destination”.
“Society had drilled it into us,” Satyajit recalls. “You are successful if you went to a big city, got a job, and made it there — not if you stayed back in the village.”
Yet the pull of their ancestral village never loosened. Childhood summers spent in their 100-year-old home — milking cows for fun, roaming the fields, returning with mud on their feet — created a nostalgia that corporate boardrooms couldn’t match. “Four years into our jobs,” says Ajinkya, “we realised we weren’t cut out for it. One life to live. Why not give farming a shot?”
Fresh Amla
When they returned in 2012, they found a bleak picture. Their family had kept to sugarcane, “the laziest crop”, and with little investment in house or land, everything seemed to be falling apart. Yields had plummeted: “The same land that once produced 100 tonnes of sugarcane, now produces barely 30 tonnes,” says Satyajit. “Inputs have tripled, quadrupled even. If we continue this way, the soil will be barren in 20 years.”
But for them, farming was not just an income stream. “For a farmer’s son, farming is identity. It’s culture, tradition, roots,” says Ajinkya. “Destroying the soil meant disrupting who we were.”
That concern pushed them towards alternatives. They began to read, travel, and learn — not from universities, but from older farmers and books. “We had no agri background, and that helped,” Satyajit laughs. “If I’d studied agriculture formally, I’d probably have been brainwashed into chemicals-only farming. Instead, we met inspired farmers across India, some driven by spiritual intent, and pieced science together ourselves. Later, we found validation in research from institutes like America’s Rodale Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to growing the regenerative organic movement through agricultural research and education.”
A farmer tends to sugarcane — a crop that has shaped the land and livelihoods in Bhodani for generations. (right) Turmeric cultivation.
With that, the brothers came to see soil as living, breathing. “One teaspoon of healthy soil has more micro organisms than the humans on Earth,” Satyajit explains. “Your job as a farmer is to feed them. They love carbon — trimmings and all the things farmers usually burn. Add cow dung and urine, rich in microbiology from a cow’s gut, and the soil comes alive again. That’s how farming was done for 5000 years before the Green Revolution disrupted it.”
At their farm today, the soil is covered with mulch, never left bare. Rainwater harvesting pits recharge groundwater, while 10,000 pine trees planted along the borders act as windbreaks and microclimate stabilisers. A food forest is taking root — wild herbs, shrubs, trees, and crops growing together in symbiotic harmony. “In nature, nothing is dependent on anyone else; everything supports each other,” Ajinkya says. “That’s the model we follow.”
The proof of the pudding is in the eating of it. On the farm, we plucked guavas, limes, and amlas — their crisp tang and orchard-fresh sweetness capturing the pure joy of eating straight from the tree. Lunch at their home on the farm was soulful yet straightforward — stone-ground khapli wheat rotis paired with sprouts usal, a nutty peanut-drumstick gravy, the fiery punch of thecha, and a comforting dry potato bhaji. Steaming rice drizzled with ghee completed the spread, all washed down with a tall glass of buttermilk.
The brothers believe deeply in heirloom and indigenous seeds. “They’re nutrient-dense, and save farmers from dependence on hybrids that vanish after one season,” says Satyajit. Their company, Two Brothers Organic Farms even runs a native seed bank, sharing seeds with farmer friends. Twenty bee boxes dot the farm, supporting pollination and nomadic beekeepers. Even transport has been reimagined — their electric carrier, fondly named Mayuri, ferries fresh milk from the cowshed to the kitchen without emissions.
“Right now, our soil is worth its weight in gold,” says Ajinkya. “We want to leave it in better shape than we received it.” The brothers’ early years were less idyllic though. Satyajit tells us how, for the first two to three years, they were purely farming — experimenting, failing, trying again. However, selling papayas at the local mandi showed them the limits of just growing organically. “We realised farmers like us needed not just to grow, but to build a platform to sell produce at the right price,” Satyajit recalls.
That platform was born almost by accident. A women’s wellness festival in Worli offered them their first city stall (at a discounted '5,000 fee). “We weren’t even selling products, just explaining why food should be grown this way,” says Ajinkya. Encouraged, they began attending Kavita Mukhi’s farmers’ markets in Bandra. For four years, every Sunday, they packed their car on Saturday night, drove to Mumbai, set up two small tables, sold till 3 pm, delivered to shops, and went back to the farm past midnight.
“It was exhausting, but it gave us community,” Satyajit says. “People who understood, who valued, who validated what we were doing. That built the foundation of everything that came next.”
Eventually, some of their products — jaggery, oils — proved shelf-stable for over 12 months without preservatives. That discovery led to their online shop, and from there, the growth snowballed. From annual revenues of R30–35 lakh in its early years, the brand has scaled to R200 crore in yearly revenue with a valuation of R700 crore. It is an ECOCERT-certified, biodiverse, and self-sustaining company, supported by investors like Rainmatter, Akshay Kumar and Virendra Sehwag. Facilities grew too: from kitchen and tin sheds to larger processing units, constantly by reinvesting and “unlocking the next step.”
Alongside the farm’s growth came its role as a knowledge hub. Over 20,000 farmers have been trained through their workshops; 5000 work closely with them across 17 states, guided by a 15-member agri-graduate team on their payroll. A Farmer Relationship Management app tracks data from seed to harvest. Visitors, too — from backpackers to podcasters — have stayed at Bhodani, learning and sharing the brothers’ methods. In fact, the farm’s earliest YouTube content wasn’t even made by them, but by a guest who insisted, “Boss, this knowledge has to go out.”
Small-batch food without preservatives, eco-conscious packaging, community markets, regenerative soil practices — all of it ties back to the same ethos — natural food will age, mature, and decay that is the natural order of life.
To the Hange brothers, it is still about Bhodani village, still about soil. “Farming isn’t a profession,” says Satyajit. “It’s cultural connect, it’s identity, it’s tradition. We just chose to return to it — and found that the soil gave us everything back.”
20,000
farmers have been trained through their workshops
WHAT ORGANIC FARMING TEACHES YOU...
1 Soil is everything. Hardcore farming begins beneath the ground. As Satyajit put it, “As a farmer, you don’t look up, you look down.” Healthy soil teems with micro organisms — one teaspoon can hold more life than the entire human population. Feed the soil, and the soil will feed you.
2 Conventional farming is a dead end. Decades of chemical-heavy practices have slashed yields. A farm that once produced 100 tonnes of sugarcane now yields only 30. Costs have tripled, soils have lost carbon, and water-holding capacity has collapsed. Farming this way is not just unsustainable — it erodes identity and culture.
3 Nature thrives on diversity Monocropping weakens soil and drains it of balance. Shifting to polycropping and eventually to a “food forest” model restores equilibrium — fruit trees, nitrogen fixers, and herbs growing together emulate nature’s own design and keep the land resilient to floods and droughts.
4 Indigenous wisdom is the real science. Cow dung, urine, mulching, and carbon-rich farm waste are not “old-fashioned” — they’re microbiological powerhouses. Traditional inputs revive soil fertility far better than artificial fertilisers ever could. What modern science is now proving, farmers knew for millennia.
5 Farming needs community, not just markets. From farmers’ markets in Bandra to training 20,000 farmers across 17 states, the brothers realised that growing food is only half the job — building systems of trust, knowledge, and fair prices completes the circle. Hardcore farming is as much about people as it is about crops.
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