After a long pause we made some progress last week. We brought in a contractor for constructing a well. He thinks we should be able to get sufficient water at a depth of 10-15 ft. We are also talking to a neighbor on the possibility of utilizing their unused well.
Getting electricity connection is continuing to be a challenge. Electricity office told us that either we need a certification from the agricultural department that the connection is for agricultural purposes, or we need to have a building permit to get electricity connection. When we visited agricultural department they said agricultural connection has a subsidized tariff and so they require at least 30 cents (0.3 acre) of land to issue the certificate, but only have 27 cents! We said we don’t need subsidy and are ready to pay full commercial tariff. It seems we are stuck in red tape. Frustrating.
In the mean time, we cleared all the wild grass and other vegetation on the field with some external help. We left everything on the ground as an organic mulch. We also need to bring down a few branches of trees. I have attached a couple of pictures of the field. One with the area where we plan to start planting vegetables, and the second is the existing banana plantation.
I hope we will get through the hurdles in electricity connection and get going with farming quickly.