THEY know how to lay on a welcome in India. “Some very special people are among us,” said the master of ceremonies in the sports arena of Yabavindra public school. “The Sun and the Moon and the stars are curiously descending to have a glimpse of them.”

The Prince of Wales was bringing his organic farming crusade to India. This is an ambitious idea given that, despite all the headlines about India’s modern tiger economy, two thirds of the population are still involved in agriculture, and the sort of practices that the Prince encourages at Highgrove are mostly unheard of.

But you have to start somewhere, and the Prince started yesterday in the Punjab village of Bhattmajra.

The Duchess of Cornwall took the morning off. One imagines that there is only so much organic talk one can hear and she must get an awful lot of it at home.

The Prince was like a pig in (chemical-free) muck. On this tour he has asked if everything is organic, from carrots to donkeys, to photographers. Now he could really get stuck into the subject he loves.

The Punjab is India’s granary. The state’s fertile soils comprise only 1.5 per cent of the country’s geography but yield 22 per cent of its grain. However, highly intensive farming methods are putting pressure on the water table and destroying the soil.

The Prince was presented with the obligatory marigold garlands when he arrived, and he proceeded through the village within a phalanx of bhangra dancers who wore brightly coloured, fanned turbans called kule walis. They performed a harvest dance that involved much hopping and spinning and shouts of “Hoi! Hoi! Hoi!”. A lone ox tried to join in the chorus from behind a wall.

The Prince smiled politely but was clearly eager to meet a farmer. Hemant Kumar took him to look at a field that he is turning over to organic farming. It looked an unremarkable patch of earth, except that it had a rope line around it which about a million Indian photographers were trying to cross.

The Prince and Mr Kumar talked very earnestly about it and then went to look at some cows and talked very earnestly about them as well. He looked in on a co-operative where women were spinning khadi, a homespun cotton that Gandhi famously taught himself to spin so that he would not have to wear British cotton.

At a point just off the Grand Trunk Road, the historic route from India to Afghanistan where Rudyard Kipling’s Kim was set, he was taken to see a compost manure shed.

He spent a great deal of time studying this. The back of his neck and his pate began to burn, but he did not seem to notice. He unveiled a plaque, received a present, talked some more. Reporters threatened to keel over in the heat. The Prince chatted away happily.

The organic roadshow moved on to Patiala, a busy town where cows wandering down the middle of a main thoroughfare are the norm, but the sight of a Prince addressing a large arena about the virtues of sustainable farming is a little more unusual.

The Duchess turned up and the couple spent what felt like a decade talking to vividly turbaned and lavishly moustachioed and bearded organic farmers who were showing off their wares. The schedule began to slide.

Inside the arena the master of ceremonies caused a near- sensation, announcing what sounded like “the heir is pregnant” and pausing while the potential ramifications of this sank in, before adding: “With excitement and anticipation.”

After a great deal of music and vibrant dancing, the speeches started at exactly the time on the schedule when the Prince was due to leave. He looked happy to stay all night.

When it was eventually his turn, he announced the start of the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, which will promote sustainable farming and has backers with deep pockets, such as Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian steel tycoon.

The Prince made serious points about the high suicide rates among struggling farmers in the Punjab and the need to preserve the land for future generations. His message was slightly confused by a translator cutting in after every paragraph to translate it.

At one point he broke in before the Prince had spoken. “Hang on!” the Prince said briskly. He and the Duchess tottered down from the grandstand to get their hands dirty planting some saplings.

“These are not mere saplings,” boomed the fruity MC over the public address system. “They are the roots for the future that unite the people of the Punjab and the Royal Family to bring about revolution in organic farming.”

“You plant them so beautifully, darling,” the Prince cooed to his wife. She smiled, in the way any wife does when she is indulging a husband who is obsessive about his hobby.

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