Not only a farmer, a musician, an educator and an actor, but also the founder of the Solitude Farm and Organic Kitchen at Auroville in Pondicherry, India, Mr McKenzie was inspired by the vision and the philosophy of Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese Zen Master and farmer.

Based out of Auroville for the last 23 years, he works on integrating permaculture, music, community and local food as a vision for social change.

In the year 1993, he shifted to Auroville after finishing his studies at the J. Krishnamurti School in the UK. While tending to vegetables in the school, he also studied acting, music, biology, French and jazz guitar. Working as an apprentice at the Annapurna farm, he helped in establishing an Aranya of 50-acres, as a farming and reforestation project in Auroville. In the year 1996, he launched the Solitude Farm for creating a dynamic community around local food, permaculture and natural farming. The farm runs an organic restaurant and serves daily lunches prepared with fresh ingredients grown on the farm. Solitude also runs a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, whereby subscribers receive baskets of fresh fruit and vegetables weekly. His work is termed as “social agriculture”, and it is a topic of research on the relationship of local food to ecology, economy, culture and society.

In the year 2006, he founded a band named Emergence, and the band has performed at the Glastonbury festival in the UK, Maximum India Festival in Washington D.C and Blue Frog at Mumbai. Moreover, he plans to conduct the annual eco music festival titled Lively up Your Earth (LUYE) at Solitude every year. He has also acted in various theatre plays like Moliere, Shakespeare, Brecht, Pinter, Neil Simon and more in his younger days.