Plan a visit

The site open to visitors is at Chak Shahzad, Islamabad — eight kanals inside Shahjani Farms’ forty-four. The camps, the farm shop, the nursery, the compost pits and the herd are all there. A second site is in development in Karachi, at the Youth Development Center, on land lent to us, and is not open to visitors yet. Visits to Chak Shahzad are arranged in advance and confirmed on WhatsApp.

Winter camps at Chak Shahzad, with pre-registration open. Ages 2–4 run five days, two hours daily, 9–11 am. Ages 5–8 run five days, two hours daily, 4–6 pm. Ages 13–18 do Nature Unplugged, one full day, 9 am to 5 pm. The Family Nature Hour is open to all ages, one hour by arrangement, from November.

Not through the website yet — the farm shop opens once every price is settled. What it will carry: seasonal vegetables and fruit, desi milk, duck and chicken eggs, composts and potting mixes, heirloom seed, fruit saplings, grasses and potted plants, all grown on the farm’s own compost. Everything is harvested or potted to order rather than held in stock, delivered on fixed days in Islamabad, in crates that come back with your kitchen peel in them. Until the shop opens, ask on WhatsApp.

Kitchen peel, culls, trimmings and animal bedding are weighed in at the gate. They spend about sixty days in pits, windrows and worm beds, turned by hand — labour is the only input. They come back out as compost for the beds, and then as food. The harvest goes out in crates, and the crate comes home with peel in it, which starts the whole thing again. Nothing leaves as waste.

Everything is grown on the farm’s own compost, permaculture-grown and biodiverse. From Zero does not claim any certification. What it claims is the method, which is described in full on the Impact page and is visible to anyone who comes and looks.

Yes — that is an open invitation. Give From Zero idle ground on your campus, society or community land and the spot is built at our cost and run by our team. Your waste stops leaving, food comes back to the people who gave the ground, hiring is local, and if it is not working the land goes back to you better than we found it.

Yes. Partnerships run with schools and universities, restaurants and hotels, corporates and CSR teams, and municipalities: a scrap route with real weights, a monthly diversion statement, and produce back through the same door. Households come into the loop through the shop crates.

Umair Jaliawala started it at home during COVID — plants on every surface and a duck pen in the yard, until the collection outgrew the house and had to move out. It went onto ground on 15 August 2023 at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad: thorny jungle and hard soil full of stones, land nobody wanted, with everyone who looked at it saying it was not worth the trouble. The plan was manure and water. That is where the name comes from. That ground is no longer ours, but nearly everything growing at the other spots was proved on it first.