On the outskirts of Pune, where the city thins out into dusty roads and half-built homes, something green is quietly blooming. You won’t spot endless sugarcane fields or tractors rolling past. Instead, tucked away in rented rooms, rooftops, and old verandahs, rows of leafy vegetables grow, not across the ground, but stacked one over the other.
It’s called vertical farming. No acres, no soil, no big machinery. Just trays, water, light, and a lot of patience.
The people behind this quiet green movement aren’t traditional farmers. They haven’t grown up watching crops change with the seasons. Some were call centre workers. Some studied engineering. Others were simply looking for something meaningful to do when life hit pause. And somehow, they’ve ended up growing food and with it, a sense of purpose in the most unexpected spaces.
It All Started with a Few Leaves on a Balcony
Back in 2020, when the world went still during the lockdown, people in Pune like everywhere else found themselves inside their homes with too much time and too little certainty. Many young folks, restless and jobless, began growing little things. A few coriander seeds. A tomato sapling in a bottle. Pudina in a plastic crate.
For many, it was the first time they had watched something grow. Slowly, silently, a tiny connection formed. That sense of wonder of planting something, waiting, and finally seeing it sprout, stuck.
Some of them didn’t stop. They looked up videos. They spoke to people. They started tinkering with pipes, lights, and timers. And that’s how a movement began, small, simple, sincere.
What Is Vertical Farming?
Forget everything you know about farms. This isn’t open land or mud-soaked boots. In vertical farming, crops are grown in clean, controlled trays stacked on shelves. There’s no soil. The roots sit in water mixed with nutrients. Lights mimic the sun. Timers keep the water flowing.
Everything runs on a system. No pests, no weeds, no rains to wait for. Just careful hands and quiet monitoring.Even a 10x10 room can produce boxes full of spinach, basil, or lettuce every week. Water is reused. Waste is minimal. The space is small, but the results are big.
The New Farmers of Pune
In neighbourhoods like Kharadi and Lohegaon, you’ll now find a new kind of farmer, one who doesn’t wear gumboots but knows exactly how much pH their lettuce needs.
Three friends in Lohegaon, all in their late 20s, turned an old garage into a microgreen farm. Today, they supply fresh mustard shoots to cafes in Baner and meal-prep services in Koregaon Park. “Our fingers used to tap keyboards,” one of them smiles. “Now they carry crates of coriander. And we love it.”
In Akurdi, two sisters who once planned to open a tuition centre ended up growing salad leaves instead. What started as a few trays on the balcony is now a quiet indoor farm that supplies greens to local stores and homes.
None of these folks had a farming background. What they had was curiosity and hunger to do something real.
No Middlemen, Just Messages and Trust.
These small farms don’t send their greens to mandis. There’s no chain of buyers and sellers. Instead, it’s all direct. They take orders on WhatsApp. They share updates on Instagram. They deliver the harvest themselves, sometimes on scooters, sometimes in cloth bags, sometimes with a small handwritten thank-you note.
Customers love it. The greens are fresh, sometimes harvested just hours before delivery. There are no chemicals, no cold storage, and no guesswork.
Some farmers even offer subscription bundles. A little bag of spinach, some baby kale, maybe a touch of mint, dropped off every Saturday morning, as regular as milk.
People not only buy the food, they connect with the grower. They ask questions, share recipes, and send photos of their salads. It’s not just shopping, it’s building a relationship.
The Bumps
It’s not always beautiful.Setting up a vertical farm takes money. Even the smallest setup of trays, pumps, lights can cost over 50,000. Electricity bills climb high, especially when the lights need to run 14 hours a day.
There are power cuts, nutrient imbalances and there are leaks. And in the early days, a lot of heartbreak. Whole batches sometimes go bad. Fungus shows up. The math of farming even indoors is not always forgiving.
Many say their first harvest was a flop. But they kept going. They tweaked, fixed, Googled, called friends. Eventually, they found their rhythm. And that’s when things got better, both for the plants and their peace of mind.
It’s Not a Side Gig Anymore
For some, this began as an experiment. A hobby or a weekend project. But for many, it’s now a career. Not a fallback, but a choice. They speak of greens the way chefs speak of food, with love, with care, with excitement. They talk about leaf colour, light angles, water pH. They fix leaky pipes at midnight and get up at dawn to check moisture levels.
The Movement Is Growing
More people are joining in. Some schools now use small hydroponic kits to teach kids where food comes from. A few housing societies have turned their terraces into community farms.
Startups like KisanVert are offering ready-made kits, training sessions, and even helping growers connect with buyers. The idea is catching on, not as a trend, but as a quiet shift.
There’s even talk that Maharashtra’s startup programs may soon include vertical farming in their support list. If that happens, many more young people from cities and small towns might take up this path, growing roots without needing land.
A Different Kind of Field, a Deeper Kind of Farming
This isn’t farming in the traditional sense. There are no monsoons to wait for. No acres to plough. No buffaloes tied to trees.These are however real farmers.
They grow food. They deal with risks. They care for something every single day. And they feed people with fresh, local greens grown in spaces that most of us overlook.
In a rented storeroom, on a rooftop in Lohegaon, in the back of a shop in Kondhwa something is changing. Something is growing.
Not every plant survives. Not every batch is perfect. But the people behind this movement keep showing up, watering, checking and learning.
And in doing so, they’ve proved something important that even without a single acre, you can still grow something meaningful.
In Pune, the fields may be missing. But the roots, they run deep.
