AgriShala
A workshop that reconnects a city with its food.
AgriShala · all-India, piloted in Lokkanahalli
A working farm · BRT Tiger Reserve · Karnataka
Three paths on one farm: subscribe to a known field, stay with us for the weekend, or help the community marketplace that we host for the people who keep this land alive.
Waypoint 01 · Subscription
Subscribe to a defined piece of land inside our pilot farm. You get a weekly photo journal from your plot — sow, grow, harvest, pack — and a basket on a chosen day, delivered to your door in Bengaluru.
You eat from a known field, not from an abstract supply chain.
Waypoint 02 · Experience
The same farm hosts stays, weekend workshops, cooking from the day's harvest, and walks into the BRT Tiger Reserve, the Jenumutti temple, and the Tibetan settlement nearby.
Two days is enough to feel the place change you. A lifetime of better meals is what comes after.
Waypoint 03 · Sustain
We support Soliga-led producers, forest-gatherers, and local cottage industries with a small marketplace that we host but do not own. They set the prices. We keep the rails.
At Lokkanahalli, the first products to enter are Soliga forest honey, ragi and jowar from their own millet plots, and wild-tuber preserves. The platform fee funds the community's own audit and pricing work.
Illustrated photo placeholders · swap with real photography when ready (Bamboo Cafe, BRT safari, fields, soil).
The pilot farm
AgriShala is an all-India idea. Its first home is a 1-acre seed farm at Lokkanahalli, on the edge of the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Tiger Reserve in Karnataka — about 3.5 hours from Bengaluru, in the foothills of the Western Ghats.
Subscription
1 acre · 10 zones · 12 weekly baskets · photo digest every week.
Experience
Bamboo Cafe · 2-day workshop every month · BRT safari, Jenumutti temple, Tibetan settlement.
Sustain
Soliga community liaison · community-driven marketplace · first retail SKUs in Phase 3.
Jayapal · Lokkanahalli, Karnataka · Founder of Bamboo Cafe.
The founder
Jayapal owns Bamboo Cafe — an organic cafe nestled in Lokkanahalli, surrounded by the kind of quiet that city people forget exists.
Before the cafe, he spent over a decade as a manager at HDFC Bank in Mysore. Numbers, targets, branches, performance reviews. A life his family was proud of, and a life that was slowly draining the part of him that actually lived.
He began showing up on weekends to plant saplings. Then more weekends. Then, one morning, he sat under a tamarind tree on a friend's farm and understood — quietly, without drama — that this was the work.
He resigned. He spent two years learning organic farming from elders in the BRT region. He built Bamboo Cafe so that a place serving honest food could also fund honest agriculture. He started AgriShala so that the rest of us could borrow a few days from the life he had chosen.
“The city will feed you for the rest of your life. Spend two days understanding who feeds the city.”
He has not looked back. The cafe still runs. The saplings he helped plant have grown into groves you can walk through on quiet afternoons. And every few weeks, a small group of city strangers arrive at Lokkanahalli to remember, for a couple of days, what it means to be fed by a place.
Contact us
For subscribers
A seasonal weekly basket from your zone. Photo digest every week. Phase 1 ships in the next quarter.
Express interestFor visitors
Two days, twelve seats, seven chapters. The current workshop runs every few weeks.
Reserve a seatFor the wider market
We host a marketplace for the Soliga community and local cottage industries. They set the prices; we keep the rails.
Get in touch