The Hindu Business Line : Vidarbha cotton farmers on a learning mission

Coimbatore, Feb. 21 For Ms Ujjwala Petkar from Kurzadi village in the arid cotton tract of the Vidarbha region, cultivating cotton for over two decades may not have enriched her family. But it has also not robbed her of enthusiasm on picking up a few lessons on crop improvement if new learning opportunity came forth.

“We used to flood-irrigate to raise cotton in our village but saw here that it would be profitable to drip-irrigate the gardens. I think I will try to use this technique,,” Ms Petkar, who hails from an agrarian tract that depends on rainfed irrigation said. Ms Petkar is among a group of 14 marginal farmers from the Vidarbha region who are here on a guided tour to some of the modern cotton farms and cotton seed processing facility, as part of a ‘confidence’ building visit jointly organised by the South India Cotton Association (SICA) and Super Spinning Mills Ltd.

“We also understood the need to select varieties of cotton preferred by the market” while interacting with the agencies promoting pure cotton, felt Mr Padmakar Argude, a member of the group. The M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) is coordinating the farmers’ visit to Tamil Nadu.

The lack of irrigation coupled with low technology application and difficulty in finding quality seeds are among their woes that pushed them to penury and distress farming over the years leading to societal stress in the region.

Model farming

“We had never been happy raising cotton in our last 20-years experience and I incurred losses in the last five years. But we managed with the farming because other crops we raised along with cotton came to our rescue,” said Mr Ramuji Nagtode, another group member. They were impressed by the quality seeds available in the South and expressed their desire to take up model cotton farming in their region, if the SICA and Super Spinning Mill came forward to provide clean cotton seeds.

The Vidarbha farmers, including six women farmers, were explained the importance of seeds and their processing at the Super Spinning Mills’s R&D seed farm, which is also promoting in-house hybrid extra long staple Sara seeds in a big way. The farmers also visited the Central Institute of Cotton Research campus here, besides the SICA’s model hybrid cotton farms.

The Maharashtra cotton growers from Vidharbha raise kariff cotton largely along with soyabean and the farmers with some irrigation raise wheat and channa also.

They sell their kapas cotton mostly to private traders and hardly 10 per cent of their crop is sold only to the Maharashtra State Cooperative Cotton Marketing Federation. They say that many of them are reluctant to sell to the federation due to delay in getting paid. Their active farming operation lasts between June and October and many hardly seem to pursue any serious avocation, other than agriculture, during lean season.

MSSRF, which is operating counselling centres and village resources centres in Vidharbha under the Jamshedji Tata National Virtual Academy for Rural Prosperity, has enabled the farmers in the region accessing market information in the form of daily price reports on farm produce and weather reports, said Mr Deepak Kekan, the foundation’s project associate from Yavatmal. This year, according to him, Vidharbha farmers could get a good yield from cotton and soyabean, and the prices too remained attractive.

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Vidarbha cotton farmers on a learning mission