Regenerating Forests, Strengthening Communities, Growing Coffee: The Bewild Story

“You come, you explain everything, you note it down, and then nothing happens.” Shruti recounts.

Weather, labour, timing, and soil conditions combined in ways that no spreadsheet could anticipate, while occasional visits could not provide the attention that farming demanded. The harder they tried to impose precision, the more clearly the land exposed the limits of managing a living system from somewhere else.

Agriculture was familiar to both of them through their families, although it was not central to their own upbringing. Their grandparents had farmed, while their parents built careers in other fields, so the land remained part of family life through holidays and visits. Sunith studied at IIT Madras, began his career at Yahoo in Bengaluru, and later spent a decade running an algorithmic trading firm in Mumbai. Shruti worked in venture capital before building her own businesses, including Hapup, a millet-based children’s food brand launched before millets became a mainstream category in India. Their professional lives had rewarded planning, systems, and repeatability, yet farming challenged the assumption that every uncertainty could be organised into submission.

During his years at Yahoo, Sunith was introduced to people working in wildlife and conservation, including filmmaker Kalyan Varma. Through Sunith, Shruti encountered wilderness beyond the controlled experience of a safari. One of the first properties the couple acquired personally was near Jim Corbett National Park, where a river separated their land from the protected forest. The intention behind this purchase was making eco-tourism a possibility in the Indian landscape, creating meaningful livelihood opportunities for the locals. Evenings could carry tiger mating calls from across the water, elephants moving nearby, and, on fortunate days, river otters appearing without the crowd surrounding a wildlife sighting.

Time in Corbett made the forest feel less like a destination arranged for visitors, while the Hyderabad farm revealed how quickly agriculture could become an exercise in forcing productivity. Between those landscapes, they began asking whether farming could connect livelihoods and ecology without exhausting the land that supported both. Sunith and his co-founder, Shaurya, later started Beforest after exiting their earlier business, while Shruti brought her experience in food, entrepreneurship, and operations into the organisation and eventually took charge of Bewild, its produce arm.

Beforest now has six collectives in four landscapes: the Deccan Plateau near Hyderabad, the Malwa Plateau around Bhopal, the upper Western Ghats near Mumbai, and three coffee-growing farms in Coorg. Each collective begins with at least 100 acres, enabling it to share specialist knowledge, absorb the costs of experiments, and study ecological change at a meaningful scale. The model applies a four-returns framework developed by Commonland that measures inspirational, natural, social, and financial capital. A landscape that recovers ecologically but cannot sustain livelihoods remains incomplete, just as a profitable farm that degrades its soil repeats the problem under a different name.

“We coexisted from time immemorial, but we have forgotten the rules of coexistence.”

For Sunith and Shruti, remembering those rules does not require removing people from every landscape. It requires building prototypes that inspire the whole landscape. Poomaale became the first serious test of that belief in Coorg.

Finding Poomaale 1

When they first entered Poomaale, the estate had spent roughly fifteen years without regular management. Coffee plants still survived beneath the canopy, but the forest had reclaimed large sections of the 128 acres, disrupting the ordered appearance expected of a commercial plantation. Many plants were old and unproductive, yet the years of reduced intervention had also allowed native vegetation, water systems, and wildlife routes to re-establish themselves.

“I think Poomaale just mesmerised us. The minute we entered, it was a complete rainforest, and coffee was growing this high,” says Shruti, holding up her hand to indicate the height of the plants.

A conventional rehabilitation plan might have begun with clearing undergrowth, pruning old plants, and returning every viable acre to production. Beforest delayed those decisions because the team did not yet know which areas animals were using, how rain travelled across the slopes, or where intervention might damage relationships formed during the years of abandonment. Since Sunith and Shruti did not come from coffee-growing families, data became a safeguard against replacing knowledge with confidence.

Biodiversity surveys brought scientists, professors, and students into the estate for intensive periods of study. Camera traps, sound mapping, hydrological assessments, and soil analysis were used to understand the landscape before a master plan was drawn. Their findings identified where cultivation could continue, where homes and infrastructure could be sited, and which areas required minimal human activity. Almost half the property was retained as a wilderness zone, while coffee and other forms of cultivation continued within mixed areas. A smaller economic zone was reserved for sustainably built homes and the infrastructure needed to keep the collective viable.

The surveys also showed that Poomaale was part of a much larger ecological system. The estate borders the Brahmagiri Wildlife Sanctuary, with Tadiandamol rising nearby, and animals move between forest, streams, and coffee blocks without recognising property lines. Repeated camera-trap surveys across Poomaale and the adjoining 176-acre Poomaale 2.0 collective recorded a lone elephant, which was later followed during another survey by an older female travelling without a herd.

Leopard cats appeared across different habitats, while Nilgiri martens and small-clawed otters were recorded near the water. An endangered Nilgiri long-tailed tree mouse was photographed using a fallen trunk to cross between forest patches, showing how deadwood that appears expendable to a plantation manager can remain essential to another species. The result was neither a plantation returned to its earlier form nor a forest cleared of human presence. Coffee remained one layer within a landscape organised around relationships already in place.

Where Ownership Becomes Stewardship

The same ecological plan shaped the way Poomaale would be inhabited. The estate was crowdfunded and is held collectively by fifty families, with around thirty-four homes planned within designated areas of only 7.6 acres. Families do not acquire separate plantation plots that can be managed according to individual preference. They enter a shared landscape where wilderness zones, water systems, and wildlife corridors remain protected by a common plan.

The homes sit among coffee, pepper, and forest rather than forming a ring around the estate, with the landscape reduced to a distant view. Their presence has made Beforest difficult to categorise, because some observers see a real-estate project using conservation language, while others assume that an organisation focused on restoration must function like an NGO. The homes are also part of the mechanism that prevents coffee from carrying the entire cost of managing 128 acres. If agriculture alone had to finance regeneration, every difficult season would increase the pressure to cultivate more land and push existing plants to produce higher yields. Revenue from homes, hospitality, and related activities allows the estate to remain viable without requiring every acre to become productive.

Living within the collective also gives members time to understand the place beyond its financial value. Shruti describes the hoped-for progression as familiarity deepening into affection, followed by the responsibility that can emerge when a landscape becomes part of someone’s life.

“A sense of belonging, and then hopefully a sense of love, and then a sense of stewardship.”

Beforest was selective during Poomaale’s first phase, particularly when a prospective member’s first concern was property appreciation. Shruti recalls that out of every forty-eight who expressed interest, 7 came forward with a cheque and one was accepted as a member, because the collective was intended for families willing to participate in work that would unfold across generations. One of the earliest families to join was a doctor-couple from Hyderabad whose home has since been built. The wife hopes to retire eventually in Poomaale, work with the local hospital, and establish a clinic for neighbouring villagers and the children of the farm team. Her plan arose from the life she imagined within the collective, rather than from a centrally assigned social programme.

Collective ownership, therefore, turns stewardship into a practical condition rather than a private preference. One family cannot clear a corridor for a better view, intensify a coffee block for a faster return, or redirect water around the convenience of its home. The arrangement also broadens the scope of the measure of whether the estate is succeeding. Poomaale still produces coffee, employs a farm team, and needs revenue, but much of its land has been deliberately removed from production. Natural recovery, social relationships, public inspiration, and commercial viability must improve together if the model is to become credible beyond a single property.

The Soil Always Remembers

Wildlife photographs could show that animals still moved through Poomaale, but they could not explain whether the working coffee blocks were recovering from decades of plantation management. That evidence had to be found beneath the canopy, where the soil retained a chemical and biological record of how the estate had once been farmed.

The team began tracking the fungal-to-bacterial ratio, an indicator of how soil biology progresses from frequently disturbed agricultural ground towards the slower nutrient cycles associated with forest systems. Four areas were tested: a block receiving concentrated permaculture interventions, a regular coffee block within Poomaale, the wilderness reference zone, and a neighbouring conventionally managed estate. The intervention block recorded a ratio of 8.13 to 1, the regular coffee block measured 7.81 to 1, and the wilderness reference measured 5.87 to 1. Across the boundary, the neighbouring estate recorded 2.83 to 1. Bacterial biomass in the monitored areas increased from approximately 111 to 729 micrograms per gram of soil, while fungal biomass increased from 369 to 6,464 micrograms per gram of soil.

The figures provided a baseline rather than a final verdict. They suggested that the working blocks were becoming more biologically complex and less dependent on external support, but the team needed repeated measurements across seasons before drawing stronger conclusions. Soil biology does not move in a straight line, and coffee plants may draw nutrients differently from one harvest to the next.

The soil also retained copper from fungicides used over decades, despite the estate’s long period of inactivity. Beforest introduced beneficial root-zone bacteria to help immobilise excess copper and support plant growth, while beneficial biocontrol fungi were used to suppress root and collar diseases. Symbiotic root fungi were also re-established to extend the plants’ access to water and nutrients, particularly phosphorus, while helping them cope with copper stress. The approach combined soil-chemistry correction, biological restoration and longer-term phytoremediation, although Shruti remains careful about describing work that still requires years of observation.

Water required a different response across the slopes. Coorg receives heavy rainfall, but steep plantation slopes can lose water, soil, and nutrients quickly during the monsoon. A landscape survey identified the property’s lowest natural point, where Balya Kere was created with a capacity of nearly sixty lakh litres. Staggered contour trenches between the coffee plants slow runoff and encourage rain to enter the soil rather than rush downhill.

Coffee across the Coorg collectives has gone without irrigation for two years because the system is designed to hold enough moisture and let go of the excess without eroding the soil. In Coorg, too much water retention could collapse an entire hill. The limited effluent from on-site pulping passes through a treatment lagoon before decomposed material returns to the plantation, while coffee husk is composted instead of leaving the estate as waste. Together, these interventions aim to establish a plantation that requires less external support as its internal cycles recover.

The ecological indicators were encouraging, but Poomaale remained a working estate whose future depended upon the value of its crop. A regenerative model that cannot support the people maintaining it remains difficult for other growers to adopt.

Learning Coffee Through the Cup

Coffee had not drawn Beforest to Coorg; it was simply what Poomaale was already producing. Bewild had originally been expected to begin around the fifth year, once the collectives produced enough food and farm products to justify a consumer-facing arm. The harvest arrived earlier than planned. Coffee cherries were already ripening at Poomaale, while tomatoes, Kadiri lepakshi peanuts, and rosella were growing in Hyderabad, so the team began creating value from what each landscape naturally provided.

Shruti entered coffee with little knowledge and no attempt to make her starting point sound sophisticated.

“Coffee was one powder, instant coffee only.”

Geetu Mohnani, a partner in Bewild and Shruti’s first mentor in coffee, made tasting feel less intimidating by asking her to begin with enjoyment rather than expertise.

“Great coffee is whatever is good for you, whatever is great for you.”

The advice relieved Shruti of the pressure to identify every flavour correctly or to pretend that bitterness had immediately become pleasurable. She began visiting cafés, attending courses and exploring coffees wherever she travelled. A brew bar appeared at home, while friends returning from abroad learnt that coffee was the gift she most wanted them to carry back. As she spent more time with the farm team, she also became increasingly aware of the labour required for every gram, from selective picking and sorting to drying, storage, and brewing.

That closeness to the farm also changed how she responded to coffee being handled carelessly. A forgotten sample or a few grams discarded during brewing no longer felt insignificant because she could picture the labour that went into them.

“Please treat it with respect. It’s personal now.”

Enjoying coffee did not tell Sunith and Shruti whether Poomaale’s crop was of good quality. Their earliest natural lots were sent to Ms Sunalini Menon and Sushanth H R, who helped the team see beyond the defects and inconsistencies of those attempts. Beneath the weaknesses was promising raw material, particularly from the estate’s ageing Old Peradeniya Canephora. The plants no longer produced the volume expected from younger, intensively managed blocks, but their genetics gave the team reason to work with what had survived rather than replace it immediately. Ms Menon supported the team over the years, drawn by the estate’s approach and the attention being given to Canephora.

The old plants presented the same economic tension that shaped the wider collective. Beforest did not want to force higher yields through aggressive inputs, yet lower production had to support the farm team and the landscape. The answer could not be to ask the land for more, so each harvest needed to create greater value through quality.

“Processing happened because that’s what Robusta needed. It wasn’t adding back enough value to the land without it being processed.”

Their earliest work focused on naturals, picking standards, sorting and drying

because the team needed to understand where quality was being lost before attempting complex fermentation. Workshops, including Marc Tormo’s Molecular Workshop, later introduced them to anaerobic processes and controlled experiments. Coffee also became a way of examining whether ecological change might eventually appear in the cup. Lots from the permaculture intervention area, regular coffee blocks, and forest-floor method sections were processed and cupped separately, but Shruti resisted attributing a flavour to one intervention after a single season. The relationship between soil, plant health and cup quality would require repeated observation across several harvests.

Processing for Value, Not Novelty

Traceability at Poomaale already separates coffee by block, allowing production data, processing methods, cupping scores, and finished lots to be compared. The system remains incomplete because dependable conclusions require several years of records rather than one encouraging harvest. The same caution guides fermentation, where a successful process remains an experiment until the team can repeat it. Naturals were followed by anaerobic naturals, Frozen Cherry processing, and a Wild Lactic Molecular Single Ferment, alongside smaller trials involving pulped lactic and rosella-influenced coffees. The list sounds like a pursuit of novelty, although the experiments usually begin with something already present within Beforest’s landscapes.

“It’s not about what’s trendy for us. It’s about what the land is giving us and what we do with it.”

Rosella grows readily at the Hyderabad collective, where its tart flowers are used for preserves. Since bright acidity is often less pronounced in Canephora, the team tested whether rosella could contribute something complementary during fermentation. Layered and infused approaches yielded mixed results: one process showed enough promise to repeat, while the other failed to justify expansion. Food technologists now divide their time between the farm and Hyderabad, where laboratory access can help explain why a fermentation succeeded and whether it can be recreated.

“We want to build it in a way that it’s not a fluke every year.”

Conversations with producers in Panama and Brazil reinforced that emphasis on consistency. At a coffee event in Dubai, Shruti met the family behind Hacienda La Esmeralda and heard about the decades spent improving picking, training farm teams, and protecting quality across changing harvests. Brazilian producers who returned repeatedly to competitions offered a similar lesson: one exceptional lot can attract attention, but trust develops when the discipline survives another season.

Poomaale’s results have given the team reason to continue. A Frozen Cherry lot from the 2026 harvest received an independent score of 88.25 from Sushanth, while a Canephora Anaerobic Natural evaluated separately by Sunalini Menon scored 81.5. The Coorg estates work with Old Peradeniya Canephora and Chandragiri Arabica, although Bewild’s public identity has become closely associated with the former, as Canephora is still judged against assumptions shaped by low-grade commercial Robusta.

Shruti continues to encounter coffee education that presents Arabica as sweet and complex while treating bitterness and harshness as defining features of Robusta. Blind tastings often unsettle that hierarchy when people enjoy a coffee before learning that it is Canephora.

“I think it’s time to break the notion that Robusta is only bad or bitter. This is what a true Robusta is.”

Bewild initially resisted allowing its coffees into blends because Shruti feared that the Canephora would disappear behind Arabica and be valued only for body. Experience with cafés complicated that position. One partner created a specialty South Indian filter beverage made entirely with Robusta, and it became one of the café’s strongest sellers because the team understood the bean well enough to build a drink around it. Bewild now accepts blends and regional adaptations when partners name the variety, communicate its contribution honestly, and treat it as more than a cheap substitute.

The coffees have reached speciality businesses including Blue Tokai, Naivo, True Black, Karafa, Coffeeverse and Maverick & Farmer. Bewild has also been featured by the Coffee Board of India and CCRI among its 100 innovative startups in the coffee and allied sectors, while its organic certification, Zero Pesticide Residue reports, and Good Market Approved status provide additional forms of accountability. These recognitions matter because they show that ecological responsibility, cup quality and commercial demand do not have to remain separate ambitions.

Beyond Poomaale

The first conversations with neighbouring growers did not begin with instructions about changing their farms. Bewild invited them into Poomaale’s processing space and showed them what the team had learnt with its own Canephora, including coffee dried for twenty-one days under monitored temperature, humidity, and moisture conditions. Some visitors were seeing a moisture meter for the first time, but the purpose was to make the process visible rather than establish Poomaale as the estate with every answer. During the following harvest, Bewild organised a blind cupping with coffees grown by those farmers. For several participants, it was the first time they had tasted coffee from their own estates rather than watching it disappear into a supply chain governed largely by volume.

“That itself was the first time they were drinking their own coffees. It was crazy, and it was so enlightening to see that.”

The growers tasted without knowing whose coffee was whose and voted for their preferred cups. Once the identities were revealed, farmers with stronger results explained what they had done differently, while others considered changes for the next harvest. Selective picking, controlled drying, and careful processing became possibilities demonstrated by neighbouring estates rather than ideas imported from distant speciality markets.

Curiosity becomes difficult to sustain unless it leads to meaningful income. Asking growers to separate lots or spend more time on processing makes little sense if the market continues paying almost entirely for quantity. Bewild has therefore begun sourcing cherries and assuming much of the risk involved in processing, storage, and eventual sale, with payments structured into three parts rather than leaving farmers to bear the uncertainty of value addition alone. Better processing becomes an entry point into wider conversations about reducing chemical dependence, rebuilding soil, and moving towards organic or permaculture-based systems.

Beforest’s expansion also tests how far the principles can travel without becoming a fixed formula. Poomaale 2.0 adds another 176 acres adjacent to the Brahmagiri Wildlife Sanctuary, extending the landscape that wildlife already moves through. Hammiyala, a separate collective of more than one hundred acres near the Pushpagiri range, begins from a very different condition. The cooler, wetter property is a fully irrigated conventional Arabica plantation being converted into a food forest where coffee will become one layer among many. Its climate, crop, and ecological history require decisions that cannot simply reproduce Poomaale.

Participation extends beyond growers and collective members. Visitors stay in the estate bungalow, walk through the forest, and remain long enough for anxiety to soften into familiarity.

Shruti remembers a child who arrived frightened of leeches and announced by the third day that they had become friends. Other guests have left in tears, surprised by how strongly they felt connected to a natural world they had not realised they were missing.

“We call it rewilding people. It’s not new. It’s just that we’ve lost that connect,” Shruti says.

The loss has a shape. For a generation raised in cities, nature has narrowed to the things we flinch from, the mosquito, the cockroach, the creatures we build our homes to keep out. And the habit follows us even on holiday, where the wild is best enjoyed through sealed glass. Fear has quietly taken the place of feeling. Moving that from flinching to belonging is the whole of the Beforest mission, and the only thing that lets everything else outlast a single estate.

The Rules of Coexistence

The possibilities emerging around Poomaale do not depend on every grower adopting its methods or every landowner forming a collective with homes, wilderness zones, and a processing unit. For Beforest, scale means making the model credible enough for others to interpret within their own landscapes, where crops, climate, and communities will demand different decisions. What can travel is the insistence that ecological recovery must support livelihoods, that commercial success cannot depend on degrading land, and that people remain participants rather than distant observers.

Coffee communicates that argument because its journey gathers the landscape into something that can be experienced. Soil biology, stored rainwater, shade, selective harvesting, and processing eventually end up in a cup held by someone who may never visit Poomaale. Food makes regeneration less abstract because consumption turns distant work into a sensory encounter.

The opening question, therefore, remains unresolved in the most useful way. If regeneration is the goal, why not leave the forest alone? Poomaale suggests that withdrawal is not the only alternative to extraction, although human presence becomes defensible only when it accepts limits and responsibilities.

“How do we learn to coexist?”

At Poomaale, the answer remains unfinished, and whether it stays on this one estate or reaches the next village, the whole district, another part of the country, remains to be seen. That is the quiet hope beneath the experiment: not a single estate made regenerative, but a way of living others might choose to follow.

For now, the answer is simply what is happening. Coffee is harvested beneath the canopy; families are beginning to build lives on land held in common; growers are testing what greater care might return to them; and the soil continues to change from one season to the next. Rainfall, roots, animals, markets and people keep altering the relationships on which the estate depends.

Remembering the rules of coexistence does not mean taking endlessly, nor pretending that responsible people must disappear. It means remaining within a landscape while accepting that belonging creates obligations that everything drawn from the land must be returned, in patience, restraint and care, as something of value.

Remembering the rules of coexistence does not mean taking endlessly, and it does not require pretending that responsible people must disappear. It means remaining within a landscape while accepting that belonging creates obligations, and that everything drawn from the land must be accompanied by the patience, restraint and care required to return something of value.