OUR VISION
To develop an environmentally conscious self-sustaining physically and mentally healthy society.
Grow Your Own Food (GYOF) is a not-for-profit Initiative in Kochi, Kerala, set up by global technology solutions provider WRENCH Solutions. GYOF is run out of the company's Kochi-based R&D Centre, and is one of the company's key CSR programmes since 2015.
OUR MISSION
To assist families to LEARN to Grow their own food by DOING and to sustain it.
WRENCH Solutions has been helping companies transform their business through digital technology for 20 years. (Read about our impact on the global engineering and construction sector here). Our commitment to social change through technology has translated into a variety of social and lifestyle initiatives, including the GYOF movement which helps ordinary citizens grow and consume their own nutritious and pesticide-free plants, out of their own homes.
WRENCH SmartProject is the world’s most advanced engineering and construction project control solution. It allows you to manage projects online and in real-time, keeping them running smoothly despite changes, delays, or setbacks.
Why we did it?
The movement began when WRENCH CEO Daniel and his wife Maya (read her story here), both die-hard health and sports fans and active in their local communities, learned that Kerala, although one of the most popular tourist destinations in Asia, is also one of the unhealthiest!
In recent years, high labour costs and adverse weather conditions have caused agriculture in Kerala to dwindle to almost nothing, with the result that the state is now almost entirely dependent on other states for fresh fruit and vegetables. However, the fresh produce is so high in pesticides* that Kerala has a very high rate of cancer, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and other lifestyle diseases. As passionate believers in a healthy work-life balance, Daniel and Maya knew they had to do something about it.
They started with what comes naturally to IT folk at an R&D centre: research. The research led them to investigate further how food and health are closely interlinked. Soon they began brainstorming on ‘backyard farming’ as a way to get healthy and fresh food directly from garden to table.
Healthy body, healthy mind, healthy life.
GYOF officially began with a project at their home and of local WRENCH employees in and around Kochi and was spearheaded by Maya, who apart from being WRENCH’s Chief Quality Officer is also keen to get the new generation into farming. (Kitchen farming is gadget free and provides quality family time.) The project started as a twenty-square-meter rooftop kitchen garden which grew green leafy vegetables and other common vegetables like tomatoes.
From this a successful Smart Kitchen Garden (SKG) followed with innovative new technologies like automated ‘fertigation’ and Organic Waste Management.Then came Smart Precision farming (SPF) for the Semi Urban and Rural population. GYOF advisory board consist of leading professors from the Agricultural University to continuously guide and monitor the GYOF teams and specialist Medical Doctors to provide guidance on nutrition. Recently, an app was developed to help people to get support for their issues and sell their excess vegetables directly to the end customer. So GYOF is today a full-cycle lifestyle movement that helps people at every step from growth to distribution to disposal.
Daniel and Maya believe that this initiative will strengthen the community in far-reaching ways. Since GYOF began they have seen families become self-sufficient in producing fresh and safe vegetables. They have watched families learn to do farming together and find a solution for kitchen waste, while cultivating healthier dietary habits that prevent common lifestyle diseases.
GYOF’s vision for the future is to develop an environmentally-conscious, self-sustaining, physically and mentally healthy society.
* Source: The Hindu
