Not a farm that grows food. A farm that grows the science of food.
01 · The Ground
The southern ridge of Delhi sits on Aravalli foothills — pre-industrial soil, older than the Indus.
Farm8 occupies a sliver of this geology. The ground itself is the asset: soil that remembers what soil is, before the chemical century arrived.
Twelve years of regenerative practice — no synthetic inputs, no tilling against the grain, no monocrops — has restored a microbial community on this land that no amount of intervention could fabricate elsewhere. The site is the experiment. The site is the proof.
28.4733° N · 77.1231° E · Aravalli edge
The land, before the institute · ©Edmund Sumner
02 · The Work
Every plot is a longitudinal soil experiment.
Microbial diversity, organic carbon, mineral profile, water retention — recorded across seasons, across cycles, across years. The soil is not improved by ideology. It is improved, then measured, then improved again.
Assayed for what conventional metrics miss.
Farm8 produce is profiled for nutritional density, polyphenol content, micronutrient spread — and traced back to the specific plot, the specific microbiome, the specific intervention that grew it. Soil-to-plate, with the numbers attached.
Where the institute is not a building but a practice.
Farm8 hosts the residencies, fellowships, and clinical programmes that make PHĪME's interdisciplinary architecture concrete — the metabolic-medicine clinic meets the soil station, the artist residency meets the longitudinal cohort.
Convened here
The third function is not a plan. When AgriForum took its programme out of the gallery and onto working ground for the first time, the ground was this one.
AgriForum On-Site #1
Art and Permaculture — Regenerative Thinking as an Artistic Perspective
Three days on permaculture as practice rather than position — the fundamentals of urban growing, what modern agricultural method has cost the ground it works, India's agrarian context and its biodiversity, and the place where regenerative design and artistic practice turn out to be the same activity.
Farm8 has since hosted a second AgriForum gathering, Acts of Re/Collection. AgriForum is FICA's ongoing platform for artists and collectives working with the agrarian as a site of enquiry. The programme, at FICA ↗
03 · The Year, Turning
Four seasons, five rings, no root crops and no hybrid seed — the working calendar the beds are actually run to.
Delhi NCR gives you 5 °C in January, 45 °C before the rains, and a monsoon in between that will drown anything planted flat. The chart answers that year rather than a generic one: what goes into the ground each month, what to layer on the beds before it does, which open-pollinated variety to order, and what the bees are given to forage while it grows.
Colour key — the rings, read from the centre out
LAB — lactic acid bacteria serum, brewed on the farm. The dilution, the carrier and the hour it goes on all change with the season: 1:1000 with garlic at dusk through the monsoon, 1:500 into the compost before autumn sowing, 1:1000 lukewarm in the cold, 1:800 with humic acid before six in the morning through the summer.
July – September
26 – 35 °C
October – November
12 – 32 °C
December – February
5 – 22 °C
February – April
22 – 45 °C
Open-pollinated seed only — Yarroway Farm, Sahaja Seeds, Organic Bazar, SeedVanam. Seed saved at the end of a cycle can be replanted at the start of the next, so the farm accumulates its own soil-and-climate memory instead of buying it back every year.
Varieties named Pusa come from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi — bred against the exact fungal pathlines and weather swings this district produces. Local resistance, built in, rather than imported vigour that fails in the first bad August.
The soil is never tilled or turned over. Nutrition is laid on from the top, the way a forest floor feeds itself — which keeps the soil food web intact and leaves the dormant weed seed where it is, buried.
04 · Under Study
Farm8 says the soil here has been rebuilt. That is not a thing a farm should be trusted to say about itself.
Since 2026 the ground has been under independent assessment by Jawaharlal Nehru University — a central university, measuring this land on its own instruments, to its own methods, and reporting whatever it finds.
Agroecological, Sustainability and Soil Health Assessment of the Permaculture System at Farm8
The frozen archive is the part we care about most. Samples of this ground, preserved — so that the same soil can be re-tested one day by science that does not exist yet.
Phase I fieldwork under way · findings expected 2027 · results will be published here, whatever they say
05 · The Architecture
The studio buildings on the land — designed by Studio Array — are not separate from the soil work.
Architecture · Studio Array — Photography · ©Edmund Sumner
They are the spaces where data is read, food is plated, residencies are housed, and the cross-disciplinary protocols of the institute are practised. Architecture, agriculture, and clinical research share the same threshold here.
The kitchen is downstream of the bed. The clinic is downstream of the kitchen. The data is downstream of all three. There are no walls between disciplines because there are no walls between systems.
06 · Custodianship
Custodian · Artist · Twelve-year steward of the land
Farm8 exists because someone refused to treat this ground as real estate. The soil now studied here was restored — quietly, without an institution behind it — by a single custodian's twelve-year practice of regenerative cultivation, archival listening, and refusal to extract.
The institute did not build the ground. The ground built the institute.
"You don't research soil. You live next to it long enough that it tells you what it knows."
— Farm8 · Aya Nagar
Rashmi Kaleka · BMW Artist Films × India Art Fair — watch on YouTube ↗
07 · The Land, Seen
Photography ©Edmund Sumner · Multi-strata cultivation · 40+ species in continuous rotation
08 · When night falls
Farm8 is the proof of concept. PHĪME — the Planetary Health Institute for Metabolic Ecology — is the system that scales it: clinic, data infrastructure, school, and evidence chain, all downstream of this soil.
09 · Find Us
Farm8
Aya Nagar, New Delhi 110047, India
South Delhi ridge · Aravalli foothills
28.4733° N · 77.1231° E
Plus code F4FF+86 New Delhi
Farm8 is a working research farm and artist residency, not a public attraction — visits happen by arrangement, around the rhythm of the land and the programmes running on it.
Residencies, programme visits, school and research groups: write to the farm.
Custodian: Rashmi Kaleka ↗ — artist, twelve-year steward of the land.
Architecture: Studio Array.
Photography: ©Edmund Sumner.
Institute: PHĪME ↗ — Planetary Health Institute for Metabolic Ecology.
The gate is open.
Write to the FarmResidencies · programme visits · soil & food collaboration — real letters get real answers.
Or follow the daily life of the land: @ayanagarfarm8 ↗
