According to Indian Council for Agriculture Research (ICAR), the Indore research station was set up where the Institute for Plant Industry (IPI) used to exist.

IPI was established in the 1920s by the Maharaja of Indore, ostensibly to study cotton.

But it also seems to have been a way to offer a research position to Albert Howard, a British agricultural scientist who first came to India in 1905 to work as an imperial economic botanist at Pusa.

He started studying their traditional methods- of animals raised alongside crops, with their wastes, and other plant wastes forming the only fertilizers.

Howard was an expert in fungi and he theorized that traditional methods nurtured fungi and microbes in the soil, leading to better soil health than what was created by artificial means.

Howard’s theories would lay the principles for the organic farming movement, but they proved too radical for his colleagues at the time.

But Howard realized that the princely states offered more liberties than the directly British ruled provinces.

Indore gave him a chance to continue his research without leaving India.

Howard developed and popularised what he called the Indore process, a method of combining animal and plant wastes to ensure rapid decomposition into a form that could be used in farming – a scientific system for composting.