CS Grewal, a powerfully-built man of 54, sporting a long grey beard, red turban and curved Shepard’s stick cuts a striking figure as he walks purposely across the land on the edge of his seven-acre organic vegetable farm in the state of Pubjab in northern India.

Black smoke slowly rises from his neighbour's farm as flames lick-up near to the ground in the rice paddies. Grewal's neighbour is burning the straw leftover from harvested rice plants to allow him to sow a new crop, wheat, quickly in the same field.