IT is 5.30 o’clock in the morning at Lonavala’s Kaveri Farms and Indu Kapadia, who went to bed the previous night at 12.30 a.m. after taking her 17 dogs for a walk, is prowling around with a lantern preparing for the start of another day. It doesn’t matter that this is Sunday. For Indu, every day is the same. In her line of business, there is no holiday. No rest day. Her morning begins de rigeur at 5.30 a.m. And it begins with the milking of cows. About 160 of them! Kaveri Farms does not have a cock crowing at the crack of dawn to wake up the household. The simultaneous mooing of a hundred odd cows is enough to shake the neighbourhood out of its slumber!

Thankfully, the farm is on a large, 13-acre plot of land, and the nearest neighbours are at a water filtration plant that was inaugurated by Sharad Pawar and which does not work half the time. So there is no fear of Indu’s cows waking up anybody. She is a cheerful lady who wears a short crop of distinguished white hair and is getting on in years, but Indu is energy-plus, and not beyond getting onto a bicycle and pedalling about the farmland to check on her cows. Kaveri Farms is run by a joint family: there’s Indu and her husband, who spends the week in Bombay looking after other business; her brother and his wife; her sister and her husband; and Indu’s neice Kaveri, after whom the farm is named.

It sounds absolutely incredible and utterly charming that Kaveri Farms is an Enid Blyton-like place in the wilds of Lonavala where this family of unfarmer-like people are in the dairy business and producing milk and ghee like which India has not seen before. The cows are of mixed breed. There are Indian Sahiwal and Gir cows from Saurashtra, and Holstein cows from Denmark and Jersey cows from the Channel Islands. Kaveri Farms cross-breeds the cows. This is not so much to improve their yield of milk, but because the pure breed cows have been found to be too delicate to live in Indian conditions!

The Jersey cows are small animals but they give rich milk, says Indu. Whereas the Holstein cows produce greater quantities of milk and their milk has a lot of fat content. The Sahiwal and Gir cows have dual purpose, they produce good milk and they are also sold for butchery. So, 5.30 a.m. is milking time. Later in the day, about 4.30 in the afternoon, the cows are milked again. Kaveri Farms produces 500 litres of milk a day that is sold in Lonavala and Khandala and also as far away as in Bombay. The hoteliers of the hill-stations buy the milk and also the local residents. About 200 litres is bought by the Watchtower Bible Society which has branches in Lonavala, Khandala and Bombay. "They’re a religious order somewhat like ISKCON," Indu says vaguely of the organisation better known for its predictions of doom every few years.

Kaveri Farms belonged to friends of the Kapadias, a family by the name of Carvalho, who eventually sold the farmland to them and went to live in Goa in 1989. The Kapadias had a small cotton mill in Calcutta that went bust during the great textile mill strike of the country in the 1980s. As directors of the mill, they had residential quarters on the property, and on this they used to breed a herd of 50 cows. "It made sense to buy the Lonavala farm for the sake of these cows and our 17 dogs," says Indu. "Also there was another incentive. On the farmland is an ancient Balkrishna temple. This has been our family deity for the past three generations. We were happy to become caretakers of the temple. Now we have an orthodox puja here every day."

The milk sold at Kaveri Farms comes from disease-free cows, Indu says. "It is clean and wholesome. And it is full cream milk. For Bombay, we have separate skimmed milk. The milk is put through a centrifuge separator to take out the cream. So it becomes almost fat free. Or low fat milk. Heart patients and the health-conscious consume this milk." The milking is done through modern, state-of-the-art machines. There are 16 farmhands who do the job. They bring the cows to the machines, wash and disinfect them, then fit the machines onto their udders and supervise the milking process. It takes about three hours to milk 50 cows. The last stage of the milking is done by hand. This yield has the highest fat content. The cows are virtually milked dry. No milk is left in their udders as this could lead to infection. They are then washed and cleaned, fed, and put to rest.

The milk is weighed and put in chillers and prepared for delivery. Kaveri Farms sells its milk raw. The milk is not processed. It is not pasteurised. "A lot of people like to have their milk raw," says Indu. Which means, maintaining hygiene at Kaveri Farms is absolutely essential. They keep the milk machines spotlessly clean. Raw milk collects bacteria quickly. They send their milk to the local market in cans. Before Kaveri Farms went into business, the milk supply in Lonavala was dismally poor. The so-called dairy farms only collected pouched milk and offered it across the counter. Now the good, wholesome milk from Kaveri Farms is available at select outlets like Iranian Enterprise and the Cooper Chikki Mart. Outside of Lonavala, Kaveri Farms sells it milk in sealed pouches. It comes to Bombay in insulated boxes packed in ice.

But milk is not the only business carried out at the 13-acre farm. There is also Kaveri Farms’ ghee. Indu explains the process of making ghee very simply: "The cream that is separated to make skimmed milk is treated with dahi and churned to make butter. The butter is cooked and clarified to make ghee. Cooking the butter fries its milk solids to make a mahogany brown ghee. Cooking also reduces the moisture in the ghee. It brings out its flavour. And it improves its keeping quality." Which probably means the ghee has a longer shelf life. She clarifies: "Because of the cooking, the fat in the ghee does not turn rancid. And because the moisture is reduced, when you put our ghee in a pan, it won’t sputter as other commercial ghees do." Kaveri Farms’ ghee is also sold locally and from the Kapadia’s home in Bombay, at Kshitij building on Napean Sea Road.

Apart from the milk and ghee business, Kaveri Farms has come to be recognised as a "bull mother farm" that supplies young bull calves to various breeding organisations in the country. The National Dairy Development Corporation is one of them, the governments of Maharashtra and West Bengal are buyers too, and so is the Bharatiya Agro Industry Foundation. That is one reason why Kaveri Farms has to continue with its existing bloodline of cows. The bull calves required by these organisations have to belong to this particular blood group. Anything beyond or under that is not acceptable, there is no demand for such bulls. And because they are in this supply business, strict medical guidelines are to be followed, immaculate records kept, and the bulls should be kept free of all communicable diseases. "Happily, we have got very good reports of the bull calves that we have bred here," says Indu proudly. "Local farmers say the progeny of these bulls produce three times the milk their other cows give."

The "bull mother farm" business, she indicates, is a hobby that got too big and needed to support itself. "We started with ten to 15 bulls and went upto 100," she says. "Naturally, the feed and labour costs were prohibitive and we decided to try and commercialise this enterprise." Kaveri Farms is also into artificial insemination and an embryo transfer project with the Akola University. Their vets, Dr. A. Nimkar and Dr. S. R. Gambiji, work with a Dr. R. K. Patil of the university to produce an excellent breed of cows through artificial insemination and surrgoate heifer mothers. It is an expensive business because the project requires experimentation with costly hormonal medicines. But the Akola University bears these expenses. Kaveri Farms lends its enterprise, its expertise, and its excellent cows for the experiment, Indu says.

Life is calm, peaceful and unhurried at Lonavala for Indu Kapadia. The cows keep her busy between 5.30 a.m. and noon. And then from 4.30 to 7.30 p.m. After that, she devotes time to paperwork, to watching TV, and to her dogs. She has 17. Fourteen are Alsation, two are Poms and one is a stray that Kaveri Farms adopted. She also tends to the green patch on the farmland where they grow feed for the cows and exotic vegetables for themselves in the winter. "The green maize and fodder that survives Lonavala’s monsoon is excellent for the cows," Indu says. "There is also a hybrid bajra and cow peas, which are leafy, leguminous fodder very high in protein. We can’t grow the lucerne here that racehorses are fed. And we grow vegetables for ourselves, brocolli, celery, lettuce, but this is in the winter. In the monsoon, everything dies. There are also mango, guava, pomello and black jamun trees. And we have just planted litchees. I cannot wait for the fruit to grow so that I can consume them!"

And the secret of Indu Kapadia’s energy is not the clean and pure air of Lonavala. Nor the old “early to bed and early to rise” practise, because while she is up early each morning, Indu seldom gets to bed before midnight. Then what is it? She smiles and says, “Good, pure, vegetarian food cooked in ghee, Kaveri Farms’ ghee. For me, it is really homemade ghee. I love it. And of course, a glass of milk each day produced from one of our Holstein or Jersey cows. It is bacteria-free even though it is raw. People keep telling me about its benefits. As if I don’t know already!”