A kupp, a buffalo and kabaddi

Most families buy the animal first and worry about its fodder later. But Jasvinder Kaur and her husband, Jagseer Singh, are doing it the other way around.

They are building a kupp to store fodder for a buffalo they cannot yet afford. Leading them down this path is the fact that price of toori (chopped wheat straw used as dry fodder) has seen a drop of almost 75 per cent this year. In 2024, a quintal of toori was sold for Rs. 800-1,000; this season the price dropped to Rs. 200–250 for a quintal.

So the couple figured it made sense to buy and store the feed before bringing the animal home to in Changliwala village, Sangrur district.

The family want the extra nutrition – their 27-year-old son is a budding kabaddi champion and a glass of milk from the family buffalo will help. “A better diet, especially for our son who plays kabaddi in the village,” says 50-year-old Jasvinder. The couple have two daughters, one is married and lives away, and the other, Gagan, 25, has completed her post-graduation, and manages the home after her mother fell ill a few years ago.

When the family decided to build a kupp, they reached out to a maternal cousin of Jagseer – Gurmail Singh. The 60-year-old veteran craftsman estimates that he has made over 2,000 kupp in the last 40 years. He says, “We used to make at least two every day in the months following the wheat harvest.”

The kupp is a dome-shaped low-cost temporary structure to store fodder. Once integral to Punjab’s rural landscape, it is now hard to find. Sitting in a train from Delhi to Changliwala in Punjab, I spotted only very few.

Gurmail agreed to oversee the construction, and the family’s kupp became a reality. With over 45 years of experience – mostly as a siri (bonded farm labourer) – he knows the task well. The family belong to the Ramdasia Sikh community (classified as a Scheduled Caste in Punjab) who have traditionally been tasked with managing the prickly stalks, otherwise burnt or used as industrial fuel.

A kupp is also an eco-friendly option to burning stubble as it recycles the waste wheat stalks, turning them into fodder. It replaces the need for corn silage. Since it is built outside, it also frees up living spaces in small households.

It’s a month after the harvest in mid-April. Fields of golden-yellow stretch to the horizon. Early in the day, women from the Ramdasia Sikh community can be seen picking leftover wheat in the harvested fields. In the spaces outside their homes, they sit with a chhaj to separate grain from chaff. Sometimes they spread the stalks on the village road near their homes, letting passing vehicles crush the grain out of the dried plant. Read: ‘I am unable to sell [chhaj] in this heat’

This is Gurmail’s first kupp of the 2025 season.

“We hammer the wooden pegs into the ground in a circle, tie them with rope, and then toss in the toori,” Gurmail says. The size of the circle depends on how much straw needs to be stored. He also adds a layer of dried tobacco plants to reinforce the kupp and prevent it from collapsing. “Not everyone does this,” he says. “Earlier, dried cotton plants were used.” But cotton farming has shrunk due to pest attacks, and so it’s not easily available.

This kupp is not very big and will store about 16 quintals, enough for the one buffalo they plan to bring home. “It will last a whole year when mixed with green fodder [that the family will buy],” says Jasvinder.

It’s time for family members to join in and help, and so Gurmail assigns tasks.

He gathers rice stubble to layer the toori, asking for “sookhi, geelia nahi [dry, not wet rice stubble].”

Jasvinder adds: “We’ll take out wheat straw from the bottom and cover the heap again with stubble. It’ll go down, bit by bit.”

Gurmail still does everything by hand, and says that in his youth using a machine was unthinkable. Back in the 1980s, along with nine other men, he would build a kupp to hold 80 quintals of toori from five acres of wheat. They would make two kupp in a day and get a daily wage of Rs. 50.

“We would work two days straight, day and night, without sleep. Then collapse, get up, and work again,” recalls the kupp craftsman.

His strong voice cuts through the humid morning air, barking out commands to his nephews and cousin who are handling the ropes and wooden pegs. Seven of them work together, hauling in more toori and laying down stubble. They pull the ropes tight, circling the growing heap. Jagseer climbs to the top, spreads the straw evenly, and presses it down with a rake and his feet.

“Koi cha-pani ta puch lo [someone ask for tea or water]?” Gurmail calls out around 10 a.m., about two hours into the task.

Jasvinder pauses her work to bring everyone a glass of water. She has been alternating between collecting stubble and tying bundles of toori, working alongside Gurmail’s daughter-in-law, Soma Rani, 30. Among Ramdasia Sikh families, it was once common for women to gather and build a kupp, while the men laboured in the grain market.

About an hour later, Gurmail asks for tea yet again, and tells PARI that demanding tea and water is a workman’s right. “Eh kupp banan da kaam besharam hoke karna paenda hai [The labour of making a kupp [is hard] and demands a certain shamelessness [of asking],” he adds, smiling.

The family lovingly call him “mela,” meaning fair, because “oo raunak laga denda hai [he lights up the place with his presence].” His nephew, Shanty, in his twenties, teases him: “You keep asking for tea, but don’t drink it. She has made it three times, and each time it has gone cold.”

By noon, after four hours of toil and a 30-minute break for rain, the kupp is complete – shaped like a golden cone. Everyone then gathers inside Jasvinder’s house for their first meal of the day: chapatis, ladyfinger sabzi, and tomato chutney.

Later, sitting on a charpai in the shaded courtyard, his clothes still dusty from the labour, Gurmail told PARI that the cost-effective structure, “stays intact during rains, as the stubble packed around it soaks up the water and dries out without affecting the toori inside.”

A sweat-soaked Jagseer, who spent hours inside the kupp, now sits in front of a whirring farata (pedestal fan) in an unplastered room. “Kithe bahar toori digey gi, kithe toori naal kamra bhardo [Why bother managing toori out in the open, when you can simply fill a room with it]?” he points out.

He is referring to the fact that many cattle owners now prefer storing toori in spare rooms. It’s a convenient and weather-proof alternative; others keep it in large black polythene bags in the fields.

But this family has no choice. “We don’t have space to store inside. All our rooms are taken,” Jagseer says, referring to their two-room pucca house, recently built with a Rs. 5.5 lakh loan.

Jagseer’s son, Karampreet, is a labourer and transports toori in season. He works with those who operate machines that cut the toori. He helps carry it out in tractor-trolleys to store in homes. To fill their own kupp, the family will pay a few hundred rupees for the cutting, and Karampreet will move it from the field to the plot, saving transportation costs.

The savings will be welcome as it is only seasonal work and occasional days of employment under MNREGA that keep the family’s finances going. Jagseer used to work as a labourer at the mandi – wholesale grain market – in Lehragaga but his advancing age and aching knees made him stop. He occasionally does MNREGA work or transplants paddy for daily wages. Jasvinder also transplants paddy after recovering from her long illness.

The last time the family kept a buffalo, it died suddenly and unexpectedly. This was during the 2022 outbreak of the lumpy skin disease, which killed nearly 1,800 cattle in the state.

Back then, the family had a buffalo and two cows. Jasvinder’s mother-in-law, Gej Kaur, now in her late sixties, told PARI that before the outbreak, every household reared at least two or three animals. She says later, “Many died and many were sold off, out of fear.”

Jagseer adds, “people have stopped keeping dangar [animals] because it has become too expensive. When the animal is milching, it does not even cover its own feed cost.”

The 20th Livestock Census (2018 to 2019), counted 25.31 lakh cattle and 40.15 lakh buffaloes in Punjab. The 21st Census, which began in 2024, shows a clear drop – roughly 10 per cent less cattle and buffaloes.

Falling cattle numbers and cheaper feed alternatives have dented demand for toori. “Rice straw is increasingly being fed to dairy animals as a cheaper alternative to toori,” says Dr. Prakash Brar. “Commercial dairies are switching to corn silage to feed high-yield animals,” adds Brar, who is the director of extension education at the Guru Angad Dev Veterinary and Animal Sciences University in Ludhiana.

“Earlier, we could at least collect kakh kande [bits of grass] from the fields or its boundaries. But now farmers spray [chemicals] so much, there’s nothing left,” Jasvinder says, referring to the green fodder they need. “Zamindars, those who own land, give us a deal of 1,200 rupees to harvest hara chara [green fodder] on their land.”

Landless families with cattle typically have a tenancy arrangement with landowners. They rent a patch of land for three months and grow fodder for the year on it. But this doesn’t yield much. “Mostly this amounts to just 10 bundles. Where will a poor person get the rest from? So the poor have given up their animals and buy milk from the village dairy,” Jagseer tells PARI.

A point that scientist Brar agrees with, saying that small-scale livestock rearing is labour-intensive and has become less economically viable as “organised dairies offer cheaper and more convenient milk”. A litre of cow milk from a local dairy in Changiwala village costs Rs. 40, while it is Rs. 60 for buffalo milk. Locals say that buying milk from a dairy or a neighbour amounts to the same.

But keeping a milch animal ensures purity. “Our diet keeps us going: so much makhni makhan [smooth butter] and ghio [ghee],” says Gurmail.

The family is yet to start looking for the buffalo they want to buy, but Jasvinder is sure it will make a difference. The milk will not only strengthen her kabaddi playing son, but will also nourish him as he prepares to work as a mechanic in the railways, a job that carries the promise of a steady income for the family.

The writer would like to thank Krishna and his family for hosting and guiding her to the story.

This story is supported by a fellowship from Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation (MMF).