A founder's note. Three generations of farmers. One sack of khapli. A grandmother's kitchen.

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Founder portrait

I grew up watching my grandfather farm.

Ekant Farms has been in our family since 1960. Three generations have worked these 500 acres in Mandi Dabwali, on the fertile plains where Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan meet. My grandfather farmed it when wheat was wheat — when the grain was tall, the seeds were saved year to year, and you could tell which neighbour's atta was on the plate by the colour of the roti.

By the time my father took over, that wheat had quietly vanished. The seeds had been replaced. The crop was shorter, faster-growing, easier to mill. The rotis looked whiter. Everyone said it was progress. He went along with it, like every farmer did. There was no real alternative.

Coming back

When I came back to the farm after a decade away, the first thing I noticed wasn't the soil or the equipment. It was the rotis on our own kitchen table. They weren't the rotis I remembered from my grandmother's kitchen. They tasted of nothing in particular.

My uncle, who'd been pre-diabetic for fifteen years, told me his blood sugar had climbed steadily on the same diet his father had eaten healthily for seventy years. That isn't a story about one family. That's a story about a country.

The first acre

I started reading. Talking to old farmers in Maharashtra and Karnataka who'd never stopped growing khapli. Tracking down seed from a heritage bank in Jalna. The first plot we sowed was a single acre. It was experimental — a return, more than a business plan. We harvested it by hand because we didn't have machines small enough for that little. We milled the first sack on an old neighbourhood chakki because we didn't yet own one ourselves.

The rotis from that first harvest tasted like my grandmother's kitchen. That is the only reason any of this exists.

Today

Today we grow khapli on a 100-acre plot at Ekant Farms — the first scale revival of this grain in North India. We've built our own dehulling and stone-grinding setup so the grain doesn't leave the farm before it becomes atta. Every bag of Anaamrit Khapli Atta is grown, dehulled, ground, sieved and bottled by the same set of hands. No middleman. No blending. No outsourced milling.

It's the only way we know how to do this honestly.

— Third generation, Ekant Farms