Climate's Harvest

In collaboration with Hands of Transition, a community-led initiative working across India on food and climate futures

When a country houses over a billion people, a few hundred Gods, and the climatic expanse that resembles numerous parts of the globe, you learn a little about faith and a bit more about gambling. 

Say you’re tucked into a tiny town in India, perhaps Mumbai. You stand on the turf, shuffling your feet in anticipation, surrounded by tension and chatter. Then, you take a nice, long look at your prize, the majestic stallion. But looks are not enough, because you know the wager at the racecourse is not about faith alone. It’s about reading conditions, weighing odds, and understanding forces beyond control. The horse, the weather, the ground, the timing. What looks like chance is, in fact, a careful gamble. The same gamble that plays out far from the turf, in fields and along coastlines.

What has quietly disappeared from this gamble is the option to step away. You’re Rahul, running a homestay in Konkan, notices this first at the table. Food arrives faster now, stripped of waiting, stripped of occasion. We want fruit before the season earns it, fish before the sea rests, celebration without time set aside for it. The pause that once limited risk has been removed. When restraint disappears, every season becomes compulsory participation.

Now, you’re in an age of climate uncertainty. You survive off the Konkan coast, and your name is Omkar Ranade, a third-generation mango farmer in Ratnagiri. Here’s how you’d gamble with the climate’s harvest.

Your first wager is time. It’s 2024, and luckily for you, time behaves. Flowering arrives predictably, in phases, spread across months. Harvest follows from February to May. You have room to move, to sell, to breathe. You recognise the rhythm. The climate is almost kind.

Hardly a year later, time collapses. Flowering, once spread across two-and-a-half months, now ends within a single one. Male and female flowers appear together, condensing what was once a gradual process into a brief, high-risk window. There is no margin anymore, no space to adjust, recover, or wait. The gamble begins here. 

The climate’s harvest is here even before your trees have borne fruit.

Your next wager is quantity. Change that is typically graphed over generations has condensed into a single year. In 2024, the season closed at roughly 25,000 dozen mangoes. But in 2025, the count stalls at around 10,000. Rain arrives early, overstays its welcome, and forces harvesting into a narrow window between early April and early May. You can’t blame the trees. You look up to the skies and wonder, who can you even blame? 

This year, your harvest is lost - scrutinised by numbers, felt long before the market opens.

A saturated market is a dying one. Scale sharpens the risk. Large farmers pull nearly 2,500 dozen a day from their orchard - volumes that must be sold quickly or not at all. You’re surprisingly lucky as a smaller farmer - harvesting closer to 1,000 dozen. You can slip away and make do with direct sales. 

In this climate, size no longer guarantees security. Your harvest redistributes advantage.

But you can’t give up yet, so to stay in the race, you intervene more. You are Pankaj Vaingankar, a farmer and homestay owner in Ratnagiri, and you compensate just enough to ensure your soils can sustain as they once did. You carefully add micronutrients like calcium, zinc, boron, potassium, and phosphorus in doses. Precision becomes survival, but certainty never follows. Farming, you know, is far from corporate work. There are no fixed strategies here. One misreading, one mistimed decision, and the entire season is gone.  Your harvest is a risk carried forward.

But now comes the wildcard, rain. Rice fields remain soaked until the grains rot. As Sunil Phadke, you are faced with nearly half your crop lost in a bounty that you once prayed for. Harvesting spills into weeks because the land never dries enough to enter. Grass suffers. Chillies bruise and spoil. The rain gives, and then it takes. 

Your harvest is labour with no returns.

So then you cross the fields and find a coastline. Your name is Kalpak Krishna Khanvil, and you are a fisherman. 

At sea, the odds tighten. More boats enter the water, nets grow larger, and lights burn brighter. You work longer, haul harder, and return with less. Traditions that were once guided by breeding cycles and belief systems are now challenged and almost ignored. You used to know the winds by name; they spoke to you of seasons, of the patterns and migrations of the fish. Now, you hardly recognise its voice.  Your harvest shifts with the tide.

Across Omkar Ranade’s orchard farms and Kalpak Khanvil’s fishing hamlets - the costs spill indoors. Joint families fracture. Hired labour replaces shared work. The youth migrate, unwilling to stake their futures on a season that refuses to behave. What was inheritance now feels like a risk.

Rahul once put it bluntly, after a season that left little room to recover. “If I am so busy, can I hire somebody to breathe instead of me?” The question exposes the lie beneath modern efficiency. Some acts cannot be outsourced. Breath. Rest. Waiting. Earlier, food demanded the same participation. Jackfruit chips were never available year round because the growing, the making, and the eating were inseparable. The waiting was not an inconvenience. It was the discipline that kept excess in check.

Harvest, once a finish line, has become a wager you place every year - measured not just in yield, but in what the climate demands in return.