Taimur Malik

Early life and background

Malik was born in Karachi, as were his parents. His father was a military man. His paternal grandfather was a navy officer who received a medal from the Quaid, and his maternal grandfather was a banker with the National Bank of Pakistan. Malik says his family was raised on sacrifice, the common good and the greater good. [1]

Malik thinks he has changed schools about 12 times in his life. He moved between cities such as Quetta, Multan and Islamabad. He says Islamabad is the Pakistani city he most associates with. [1]

Education

Malik finished high school at City School in Islamabad. He stayed with family friends in Islamabad to finish his A levels. He was admitted to Columbia University while still in high school. [1]

Malik did his undergraduate degree at Columbia, with Middle Eastern and Islamic studies as his main passion. He also studied economics, partly because he needed a job afterwards. He says the students of that Columbia program were considered the children of Edward Said. [1]

Career

Malik worked at Citibank on Wall Street in New York. He was in a rotational program in trade finance and stayed at the bank for a few years. At Citibank he came to feel that something was amiss. He also wanted to start a custom men's shirting company. [1]

Malik was offered the interim CEO role at a textile spinning mill in Raiwind, Lahore. The mill had closed a few days before he joined it, and he spent about 10 months there. He says a third of Pakistan's cotton crop was destroyed in one year, which pushed up cotton prices, and that a spinning mill is a low-margin, high-volume business. [1]

Drawdown Farm

Malik is the co-founder and ideator of Drawdown Farm. He has crafted an integrated regenerative system, which he calls drawdown farming, in Rahim Yar Khan and the Thal Desert. He says the farmland he works on has some central pivot irrigation systems. [1]

Malik says regenerative agriculture became his obsession once he discovered it. He has visited the Rodale Institute, a working farm in Pennsylvania. He says he went into a spiral of hydroponics around 2018 and 2019. He says his farm saved about 34,000 rupees per acre on its chili crop by relying on beneficial insects. [1]

Views on soil and farming

Malik says Pakistan uses BT cotton, a genetically modified variety, and that an organic farmer had higher yields than a neighbour growing BT cotton. He says Pakistan does not have fertile soil and that Pakistani soils are thought to have about 0.3 to 0.4% organic matter. He says the soils on his farm, pure sand of the Thal Desert, measured 0% organic matter. He says each 1% of organic matter gives an acre the capacity to store 30,000 gallons of water. [1]

Malik says urea is the prime fertilizer used by Pakistani farmers, that Pakistani urea was once three times cheaper than international urea, and that 50 to 70% of applied urea is lost from the soil. He says soil pH on their farms was 8.2 to 8.4, which is extremely high. He also says Pakistan has no molybdenum fertilizer available and that its soils are especially deficient in molybdenum. He cites an Egyptian trial in which 6 milligrams of molybdenum per citrus tree raised yields by 44%. [1]

Malik says organic certification is generally rigid and that the organic transition can take one to three years, depending on earlier chemical use. He says that for every pest killed with a pesticide application, 3,000 beneficial insects are killed. He sees a bigger role for robots in weed control than in insect control. He says Pakistan's yields are far lower than those of Thailand, India and Egypt, and that the average landholding in Pakistan is two or three acres. [1]

Malik says regenerative organic farming trials were done in neighbouring India, and that the trial observers saw a six to eight times increase in productivity. He says the India trial recommended farms of two acres or less, worked by a husband and wife. He cites a calculation that if 50% of global farmland moved to organic agriculture, all the excess carbon in the atmosphere could be sequestered in soils. He says atmospheric carbon is about 420 parts per million today and that mangroves are thought to store 10 times more carbon than terrestrial trees. [1]

Malik says the roots of the Syrian civil war lie partly in climate change. He says the world is living through a great nutrient collapse and cites UC Davis studies showing some grocery oranges have zero vitamin C. He cites a 75% decline in Europe's insect population over about 25 years to 2018 and says biodiversity loss is also called the sixth mass extinction. He says Pakistanis have the largest diabetes population in the world, and he recommends David Montgomery's book Dirt and the Erosion of Civilization. [1]

Views on water

Malik says people consider water a free resource and that flood irrigation is extraordinarily wasteful. He says the government, with World Bank funding, has a generous subsidy for impact sprinklers, and that a mulched area showed 40% additional water savings. He says the government needs metering systems so that water allotments are fair, and that some big farmers take much more water than their allotment. [1]

Malik says Pakistan is a semi-arid country with about 30 days of water storage, which is thought to be very low, while Egypt has about 900 days. He says about 40% of the water cycle for rain on land is driven by the land itself. He calls the 10 billion tree tsunami a brilliant idea and says some farmers have built so much green biomass that they have more cloud cover. He cites a World Bank study that urban trees can cut temperatures by 5 to 8 degrees Celsius. [1]

Views on Pakistan's future

Malik says Pakistan in 2050 could be very different, in a good way. He says he is optimistic and sees more hunger for change in Pakistan than ever. He says Pakistan could become entirely energy independent and can become a regional powerhouse. He also says Pakistan has domestic capital that should be pooled and channelled into investment. [1]

Personal life

Malik took a year off because his father fell ill with cancer. He and his wife stayed in New York until their son was born. [1]

Timeline

2018

Went into a spiral of hydroponics, a period that he says ran around 2018 and 2019[1]

Appearances

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Pakistan doesn't have a water problem. It has a soil problem. . Thought Behind Things , 2023-08-11.