Tulsi Tandi of Kotenmunda village of Nuapada district is a lawyer by profession in the Judicial Magistrate Court of Khariar and also the vice-president of the Khariar Bar Association. But instead of introducing himself as an advocate, he likes to say that he is a farmer.
“I am proud to be a farmer,” he says. While entering into his one acre capsicum field, he removes his shoes outside the shed net and touches the soil in respect. “It gives me Arnna (food), I cannot disrespect it,” he asserts. Tulsi has cultivated vegetables in about two acres of land and expects a good income this year. The technical and financial supports for his initiatives have come from the Horticulture Department.
The land Tulsi now cultivates was a barren field a year ago, but his determination and persistent effort has turned that in to a fertile plot of land, fit for cultivation of vegetables. He became the first farmer in the district to cultivate capsicum on commercial basis. Besides capsicum, he has also cultivated tomato in half an acre of land.
After two months of planting of saplings, the capsicum plants are now giving fruits. On the first day of plucking, the yield was more than a quintal. Tulsi did not have to take the products to the market for sale, rather, the middlemen come to the village and collect the stuff at Rs25 per kg. “The prevailing retail price is Rs40 per kg, but we have to sell at Rs25 to the middlemen,” says Tulsi.
“I was not confident initially to take the risk of cultivating capsicum, but once exposed to the experiments in Centre of Excellence in Dera, Bhubaneswar, I got excited,” Tulsi informs. The Horticulture Department has facilitated necessary financial and technical support. Two shed nets and drip irrigation systems were provided with subsidised cost and he also got regular technical support from the officials. He planted 6,000 saplings in a one acre plot and 3,000 more in another half acre plot. “In the drip system fed water at the root zone, the water use is only 10 per cent of the requirement in traditional flooding method. Further due to the shed net, there is no pest attack; so my products are organic,” Tulsi claims.
Tulsi has engaged one experienced farmer of Bargarh district to guide the local labourers in the cultivation. “The yield will be 3 quintal per day for next 3 to 4 months,” says the farmer. At this rate, the income from one and a half acre of plot of capsicum cultivation would be about Rs 9 lakh! Dilip Kumar Murmuthakur, Assistant Horticulture Officer (AHO), who is guiding Tulsi from the beginning, however differs. “Each plant would give 2.5 kg of capsicum; thus the total income would be about Rs6 lakh,” he says. “Even 6 lakh is great,” says Tulsi, who is yet to believe that, his decision would bring such a great success. He had spent Rs20,000 on saplings and the total cost of labour till the end of the cultivation would be about Rs2 lakh.
“This is the determinate variety of capsicum, where the height of plants is restricted and crop duration is only 6 months. We did it on experiment basis,” informs the AHO, adding that the next crop would be of underterminate variety, where the plant height would be maximum10 feet with a crop duration one year and the yield rate would also remarkably increase.
Fourteen farmers of the district have developed shed net and drip irrigation till now out of whom five have taken up capsicum and others have done banana and tomato, etc. However, considering the cost factor of the shed net and drip system, which is more than Rs 6 lakh per 1,000 sqft, it will be difficult for the small and marginal farmers to adopt such practices,” says Khirasindhu Sagaria, a small farmer of the district.