There could be many a slip between the cup and the lip. This reality is dawning upon cotton and soyabean farmers, even the progressive lot among them in Adilabad district who, so far had little scope for complaining.
While the cotton farmers stand to lose about 10 per cent of their crop from the first pickings, the soyabean growers could lose between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of their produce owing to reasons which are not identified yet.
The farmers allege faulty seed to be resulting in loss but scientists have a plausible explanation for the crops displaying unusual phenomenon while entering the harvesting stage. In cotton crop, the bolls are rupturing prematurely, apparently owing to some form of wilt.
A team of agriculture scientists who visited some fields in Jainad mandal opined that wilting was caused due to sudden and heavy rainfall following a rather long dry spell towards the end of monsoon.
“But we never had such a prolonged dry spell or hot and humid weather,” counters cotton farmer Kunta Keshav Reddy of Jamidi village in Tamsi mandal.
“The spell of heavy rain may have spoilt the bolls at the bottom of the plant but premature rupture of bolls is certainly unusual,” he observes.
The case of soyabean farmers is worse in Tamsi, Boath, Pochera, Kubeer, Jainad and other places in the district in that the extent of loss became apparent just when the crop was being harvested.
In villages like Jamidi, the effect of attack of stem borer and pre-harvest sprouting can be seen clearly in all the 400 acres of soyabean crop.
“We never expected this to happen with the seed supplied by Hyderabad Agriculture Cooperative Society (HACA),” says farmer Gaddam Ram Reddy. “This problem is not there in other varieties of soyabean seed purchased from open market,” he points out hinting towards the fact the spurious seed were supplied by HACA.
“No pre-harvest sprouting is part of the abnormalities encountered by the plant during its growth,” opines Adilabad Agriculture Research Station, Principal Scientist (Soya), Sreedhar Chauhan. He says occurrence of rainfall when the seed is half mature in the pod triggers off dilution of the hardening seed coat and eventually germination of the seed inside the pod.” While cotton has been cultivated in about 3.2 lakh hectare and soyabean in 92,000 hectare, the anticipated yields are 8 to 10 quintals per acre for cotton and 6 to 8 quintals per acre for soyabean.
We never expected this to happen with the seed supplied by Hyderabad Agriculture Cooperative Society , G addam Ram Reddy, farmer
