When S. Laxminarayan quit his job at SAP Labs in Bangalore recently to become a full-time farmer, he looked forward to two big life changes. "No more Monday morning blues and no getting stuck in traffic," says the product manager who quit the company after a 16-year stint.

Laxminarayan is heading to the hinterland, a 20-acre farm in Karnataka's Malavalli district, on the Bangalore-Mysore highway. "Almost everything here - from manure to water to electricity - is derived naturally," he says.

The seed of the farming idea was sown during the 2008 global financial meltdown. "I was on the bench for long periods. It drove me to find an alternate, sustainable profession," says the 41-year-old engineer.

He started with his own terrace, where he grew tomatoes, brinjals and chillies in old kitchen containers. That led to the launch of Organic Terrace Garden, an NGO of like-minded terrace gardeners. The group bought the farm the following year.

Laxminarayan is now bringing his IT skills to agriculture. He recently rolled out an e-commerce enterprise, Jivabhumi, which connects farmers and consumers online, eliminating the middleman altogether. "We have 1,500 farmers and 300 customers on board," he says.

A new brain drain is underway in urban India. A growing number of corporate professionals are giving up the comforts of air-conditioned offices to pick up the plough. But the corporate sector's loss is agriculture's gain. These new farmers are bringing with them new technologies, new business models and new learnings.

Eating natural, healthy and safe food is part of the new urban consciousness, says Girish Krishnamurthy, software developer with a Bangalore-based IT multinational and a weekend farmer. This in turn has led to a boom in India's organic food industry - current annual domestic organic food sales stand at Rs 1,330.5 crore, growing at 30 per cent per annum.

Krishnamurthy grows organic mangoes and vegetables on a 10-acre farm on the outskirts of Bangalore. "The ease of online selling has made organic farming viable," says the part-time farmer.

For Vinoth Kumar, however, farming is very much a full-time thing. He quit his job with the Standard Chartered Bank in Chennai three years ago to get away from the smog and stress of city life.

The 34-year-old engineer now works as plantation manager at the 120-acre Elephant Valley Eco Farm on the edge of the Kodaikanal forests in Tamil Nadu. Once upon a time, he drank endless cups of coffee to tide over midnight conference calls. Today, Kumar manages a 50-acre coffee and pepper plantation and a vegetable garden that grows lettuce, celery, broccoli, zucchini, avocado and sweet orange.

He's also crusading for chemical-free farming. "Until 50 years back, Indian farmers grew everything naturally - and were better off than they are today," he says. Kumar went on a two-month bicycle expedition across south India this May, documenting traditional farming practices. He's writing a book on the journey now.

When S.C. Madhuchandan rolled out his IT start-up, Verifaya Studio, in San Jose, in 2005, he was on his way to achieving his biggest life goal - setting up a Rs 100-crore company. Verifaya had its R&D centre in Bangalore and that was where Madhuchandan kept bumping into people from his hometown - Mandya in rural Karnataka. "They worked as auto drivers, waiters and domestic helps because their farmland back home was not earning them enough money. This bothered me," recalls the techie.

Madhuchandan's mission to reverse this migration began with himself. He returned to Mandya in 2014 and started the Mandya Organic Farmers' Co-operative Society - a club run by and for the farmers. Its motto is to promote zero-budget, natural farming.

Organic Mandya is also trying to eliminate the middleman. It opened a sprawling, Walmart-style organic supermarket on the Bangalore-Mysore highway, last year. "The co-operative did business worth Rs 3 crore in 10 months. My IT company didn't grow this fast," says Madhuchandan.

The agri entrepreneur has rolled out several organic tourism initiatives as well. A programme called Sweat Donation invites city folks to work out on a farm, instead of a gym. About 2,000 people have toned their abs on Mandya's paddy, millet and vegetable fields.

R. Madhavan does just the opposite. The mechanical engineer from IIT, Madras, uses his engineering education to reduce manual labour on farms. "I'd see women bent double for hours to de-weed fields. A simple, bullock cart-driven machine could do this job in half the time," says Ma-dhavan. So in 1990, he quit his job at ONGC to start a company to make agricultural tools. The venture failed. "I'd jumped the gun. I needed to know farming before building tools for it," recalls the engineer, who owns a 20-acre farm in south Tamil Nadu's Chengalpattu district.

Today, Madhavan treats his job as a science. Besides building a de-weeding tool, he's made a machine that feeds plants with fertilisers. "This way it doesn't get washed away, causing pollution," he says.

He even went to Israel, where he lived in a kibbutz (communal settlement) to study dryland farming. "I realised we were drowning our plants in water," he recalls. On returning home, he stopped irrigating his potato fields. "Everybody wrote off my crop. But my produce increased by 60 per cent," says Madhavan, who now conducts workshops to get local farmers to develop a scientific approach to agriculture.

Santhosh Singh quit his job as a six sigma champion at Dell International Services in Bangalore to start Amrutha Dairy Farms in 2010. He started his dairy farm in Bangalore Rural district with three cows on a three-acre plot. The farm now has 85 cows. Its business model has expanded to calf breeding, training, consulting and operating a cheese production unit. Singh is also in talks with investors to set up a dairy training institute.

There's one thing, however, that Singh misses about his days at Dell. He says, "When I wanted a job done, all I did was drop a mail." Managing a bovine brigade takes a lot more than a click.