Founded in 2024 by Rishabh Lohia, Wild Harvest is a social enterprise in Jharkhand’s Jonha region, around 50 kilometres from Ranchi. With a focus on ethically harvesting and processing Mahua flowers, their aim is to introduce Mahua flowers as a viable food for urban consumers, while supporting communities in Jillingsering, Dipatoli, Gautamdhara, Koynardih, and Hapatbeda villages under the Guiridih Panchayat. It has only been a year since its establishment, but Wild Harvest has already made strides with their sun-dried and lab-tested Mahua flowers.
The idea behind Wild Harvest stems from Rishabh’s work at Ekastha Foundation, an NGO he founded in 2016 to support marginalised communities in rural Jharkhand through education, environment conservation, music, and sustainable livelihoods. While Mahua has earned a largely notorious reputation because of its association with liquor, and is rarely ever consumed as food in the region, Rishabh recognised that it was an underutilised resource. To explore the tree’s full potential, especially as a source of nutrition and income for local communities, he established Wild Harvest.
Harvesting Mahua flowers is often a back-breaking task. A Mahua tree typically flowers for 10-15 days between March and May. During this period, around 40-50 kilograms of flowers fall everyday and keep a whole family—including children, their parents, and grandparents—occupied for at least four to five hours daily. To make the process of collecting flowers easier, communities would traditionally burn the patch of leaf litter under the tree, which often leads to forest fires. This results in contaminated flowers for food consumption.
For Wild Harvest, it was crucial to enhance the quality of Mahua flowers while also conserving the local ecosystem and helping communities. They introduced simple yet scientific methods to ease the process. These involved collecting Mahua flowers above the ground by installing nets, setting up bamboo machaans for drying, and equipping the local communities with tools and on-ground support to harvest the flowers. Once the flowers are sun-dried, they are packed in air-tight bags to control the moisture seeping in. These methods have reduced the number of daily work hours for local communities from five to approximately an hour.
Wild Harvest’s aim is to double the income opportunities for members of the local communities through Mahua. In the past year, the enterprise has worked with 40 households in the Angara Block of Ranchi district to harvest Mahua flowers from around 120 trees, saving approximately one tonne of flowers from going to waste. Many young people in the region, who had never consumed Mahua as food before, were familiarised with the delicious flower through cooking workshops and focus group discussions highlighting its cultural significance. While the elders, who recalled eating Mahua during their childhood, joined in the discussions with folk tales and songs about the Mahua tree.
By safely and scientifically harvesting the flowers through partnering with communities, Wild Harvest is trying to rewrite the Mahua story, pushing it both hyperlocally and globally.
The Locavore Bite
TL Bite offers a glimpse into how a partner producer runs their operations, and reflects their core principles and values. The idea is to provide insights into their practices and highlight their positive efforts descriptively. We have identified seven key areas of assessment – origin and source of ingredients, composition and integrity of the products, workforce policies, production practices, community-related initiatives, approach towards preserving or celebrating traditional knowledge and the materials used in packaging. While this assessment may not be entirely comprehensive, we hope it helps you make an informed decision about why you might want to support them, and the ways in which to do so.
The information below offers you a snapshot of where Wild Harvest stands on these parameters. We have put this together based on several rounds of conversations with Rishabh Lohia. Click on a piece of the pie below to find out more.
Why We Love Wild Harvest
- Innovative harvesting techniques: Wild Harvest encourages local families to collect flowers above the ground level in order to avoid food contamination. They provide the families with nets that are erected and put around Mahua trees, which makes collecting the flowers easier. Once collected, the flowers are sun-dried on bamboo machans, and regularly checked for moisture. When the moisture content is below 15 percent and the flowers are completely dried, Wild Harvest buys them from local communities, packs them in air-tight containers, and puts them in cold storage.
- Collaboration with communities: Community is central to all of Wild Harvest’s operations. This year, all 40 households they worked with were involved in every step of the way—from even before the flowers start appearing on trees in February to when they are stored after harvest. They also hold weekly meetings with their partners, host cooking workshops, and encourage younger members to prepare and taste Mahua-based dishes like Mahua laddoos, Mahua chutney, and even Mahua brownies.
- Environmental conservation: By encouraging communities to refrain from burning leaf litter under Mahua trees and introducing alternatives like nets to collect flowers, Wild Harvest has prevented forest fires on six acres of forest in 2024. This, in turn, helps protect biodiversity such as younger plants and smaller animals, conserve topsoil, and improve air quality.
Over the years, Mahua has received a notorious reputation for its association with alcohol, despite being an important source of nutrition. How do you think its diverse potential can be communicated to communities in Jharkhand?
The Mahua tree has been revered as Kalpavriksh (wish-granting tree) by indigenous communities for centuries. Its flowers, fruits, seeds, and even its bark have long been used by indigenous communities as food, fodder, medicine, and drink.
However, it became infamous as country liquor during the 19th century when the British banned the collection, storage, and processing of Mahua flowers under the Bombay Abkari Act (1878) and Mhwora Act (1892) to promote their own liquor. Reeling under this colonial hangover, we still view Mahua as bad-quality alcohol, which is further amplified by a general apathy towards indigenous knowledge.
At Wild Harvest, we are keen to change that perception, and make Mahua the next wonderfood! When compared to raisins, dates or even cranberries and blueberries, the Mahua flower is richer in most macro and micro nutrients, as proven by our lab tests.
In Jharkhand, the culinary use of this flower has disappeared among most communities that harvest them. I think the need of the hour is to build awareness of the food and nutritional value of Mahua flowers. This needs a multi-pronged approach. We need to hold regular focus group discussions with communities that live with Mahua, and organise workshops to promote its culinary and nutritional value hyperlocally while also promoting the food use of Mahua globally.
— Rishabh Lohia, Founder of Wild Harvest
Products We Recommend
Mahua Flowers (Sun-Dried)
How to Buy
If you would like to learn more about Wild Harvest, or try their products, check out their website. If you’re interested in supporting them in other ways, please contact us at connect@staginglatest.thelocavore.in.
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