Anaikadu Malabar Squirrel’s Leap (India)

From The Producer

Anai Kadu roughly translates to elephant jungle with Anai meaning elephants and Kadu meaning jungle, and is run by Kurian George and Nisha Thomas.

The Story

A pandemic-fuelled short escape from Bangalore brought us to the farm in May 2020. What was supposed to be a break for 2-3 weeks turned out to be over 2 years long, where we immersed ourselves in the farm life and realized this is what we enjoyed the most. Wrapping up our life in Bangalore and moving to the farm for good was a no-brainer and that’s what we did. Here we are, at Anai Kadu – doing what we love the most, growing our produce with all our love, care and dedication.

The Name

We wanted our name to convey a little more about us, our location, our ecosystem and what’s important to us. Our 50-acre farm shares a boundary with the Devamachi reserve forest, a part of the Nagarhole Tiger Reserve (Incidentally, one of the Arabica x Robusta hybrids developed a few years ago was named Devamachi after this forest) and we have the majestic pachyderms (elephants) frequently visiting the farm. So we decided to name ourselves Anai Kadu which reflects the forest we’re adjacent to, and also our favourite animals the Anai that are frequent visitors. The farm’s name also has the name of the tiny human of Anai Kadu – Anaika in it.

The farm is located at an elevation of roughly 3100 ft above sea level and has relatively flat topography. We are a shade-grown coffee plantation with our coffee growing under 2-tier shade, with mostly native trees forming our primary tree cover, and nitrogen-fixing Glyricidia for the secondary level of shade.

The larger family holding known as Pottamkulam estate, was bought by Kurian’s grandfather the late K. J. Kurian, and has been in the family since 1959.

The People of Anai Kadu

Kurian: Kurian is a 4th generation planter and currently runs the farm more or less full-time. He is also the Chief Financial Office of Bio-lutions, a manufacturing startup producing disposable tableware from agricultural waste.

Nisha: Nisha is a very new entrant to the farming scene, having spent close to a decade and a half in the corporate world with MNCs and startups. After moving to the farm in May 2020, she developed a very keen interest in coffee farming, and specifically post-harvest processing of coffee. She loves learning more about coffee and farming, and the world around her each day. She manages the post-harvest processing of our specialty coffee and also manages our social media pages.

Anaika: Our now 9-year old little girl with a curiosity for everything around her and whom we have named the farm after. She loves her books, art, crafts, music and loves to observe everything around her with a keen eye.

Bella: Our almost 2-year old labrador and first pet. High energy, extremely social and food-motivated, Bella loves to swim and follow Kurian everywhere he goes. When she’s not on the field with Kurian, she enjoys endless games of tug and fetch.