A constant monsoon drizzle follows us as we make our way to Baladia village in southern Bhuj. The semi-arid landscape of Kutch has perked up with the monsoon and green vegetation dots the parched land. We pass by the occasional herdsman, in all-white flared kurtas, dhoti and turban, and women in eye-popping embroidered abhas.
But for date farmers, rainfall is bad news. It is harvesting season and the damage has already been done: unripe dates have split and ripe ones have fallen off the palm trees. And the date farmers of Kutch are hurriedly harvesting their produce.
We turn off the road on to a dirt track towards Baladia’s Gorasiya farm, passing through acres of pomegranate, papaya, mango, cauliflower, chilli and lemon plantations. As we approach Gorasiya farm, the heady fragrance of dates hits us.
In neat, uniform rows, stand 5,500 tissue culture Barhi date palms spread over 120 acres, making this farm one of the biggest producers of dates in the country. Bunches of oval fruit, ranging from yellow to golden, hang below the fronds, partially covered by plastic aeration wraps.
A daring switch
The owner Gopal Gorasiya’s ancestors grew sugarcane, mangoes and sapota at Mankuva, their ancestral village. But over three decades ago, Gorasiya decided to make a daring switch to dates, with a little help from Israeli technology in Baladia.
His son Jitesh takes us for a drive. At the packaging shed there is a palpable sense of urgency as hundreds of workers from Jharkhand grade, sort, clean and package dates into cartons that range from half a kilo to 5 kilos. They are packed and sold in three stages of ripening — khalal (yellow and crunchy), rutab (ripe, soft) and partially rutab, under the brand name ‘Desert Dates’.
Workers busy grading, sorting, cleaning and packaging dates at the Gorasiya farm in Baladia village.
There are over one lakh Barhi palms in Kutch, spread over 1,500 hectares, with an annual production of 17,000-20,000 tonnes of fresh dates. And this owes to a tryst with Israeli technology, beginning in the 1980s.
Pravin Gala, a graduate in agriculture, attended an agricultural technology exhibition in Israel and discovered drip irrigation for the first time. He decided to volunteer at an Israeli date plantation in Arava valley, and that’s when he saw how similar the landscape and climatic conditions were to his hometown in Kutch.
Gala later imported 500 tissue culture Barhi saplings (the cultivation of which was pioneered in Israel) from a London laboratory in 1998 and created the first commercial plantation in 2002 at a farm near Ratnal village. Although Gala passed away before he could see his efforts bear fruit, his son Rahul Gala saw sweet success a few years later when he started farming, armed with a degree in Applied Science in Environment and Horticulture from Queensland University, Australia.
He applied the Israeli techniques that his father had practised and the first bumper harvest saw an average production of 260 kg of dates per palm. In 2005 the Kutch Date Development Consortium was formed by a few enterprising Kutch farmers, including Gorasiya and Rahul.
Fifteen members visited Israel to get first-hand knowledge of date farming. They visited farms and research centres, learning about drip irrigation, fertilisers, fruit development, crop protection, pruning and harvesting.
At an advantage
Together they imported 40,000 saplings, each at ₹2,500, from Jordan and the UAE. The investment proved worthwhile, for Barhi has high yields and adapts easily to Kutch soil. The fresh dates produced are in high demand in Europe, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. As the Kutch dates mature earlier than the Israeli ones, they get a two to three week advantage in the international market.
A worker at the Gorasiya farm in Baladia village.
Dates, per se, are not new to Kutch. The Kutchi kharek has always been an integral part of this landscape and culinary culture. Wedding ceremonies aren’t complete without the customary offering of dates to guests. The palms grow prolifically across Kutch, but without the precision of the Barhi farms. The tissue culture dates have an advantage in the global market in that they are more uniform in shape and size and higher yielding.
Dates guzzle water, needing about 200 litres a day. The water table having plummeted from 350 feet in 2004 to 700 feet now, drip irrigation has been the solution. Ishwar Pindoriya, who visited Israel in 2005, has a 20-acre date farm in Bharapar village. He picked up sub-surface drip irrigation in Israel. “We save up to 50% water, as evaporation is zero,” says Pindoriya.
Today, the changing weather pattern in Kutch has the date farmers worried. As we brave the rains to see the harvesting, the dates look like golden globules on the trees, but when we look down, the muddy ground is littered with fallen fruit. Rahul has lost 30% of his crop. Jitesh Gorasiya’s farm production has drastically dropped from the usual 1,000 tonnes to an estimated 650 tonnes this year.
Wine to the rescue
The erratic climate — characterised by alternating droughts and heavy rain — is taking a toll. As we walk around the rain-soaked farm, the sharp tang of fermentation assails us from a pile of wasted dates lying outside the packaging shed.
But jugaad has come to the rescue. Ranjit Singh, a businessman from Gandhidham in Kutch, who owns a 40 acre Barhi date farm in Hajipeer village, is turning these fermenting dates into wine. He has set up his own winery in Kivarli village in Rajasthan and crushed 30 tonnes of Barhi dates to produce 60,000 litres of wine last year.
Happily for Kutch’s date farmers, a Centre of Excellence for Dates is soon to become operational in Kukma village as part of an Indo-Israel agricultural project. Says Dan Alluf, Agriculture Counsellor at the Embassy of Israel, “The centre will have a pollen bank, a demonstration of propagation techniques, irrigation, fertilisation and post-harvest technology.” The aim, he says, is to find out what the challenges faced by date farmers are and find practical solutions.
The writer is a freelance journalist and travel writer who searches for positive stories across the country.
