Bumper Aus production likely in northern region

The farmers are expecting a bumper production of Aus rice this season as its harvest continues now everywhere in northern Bangladesh with excellent yield rate despite a little shortfall in the farming target.
According to the Department of Agriculture Extension (DAE) sources, the farmers have already completed Aus harvest on 35,750 hectares land, 15 percent of the total cultivated land.
The government has fixed a target of producing over 6.62 lakh tonnes of clean Aus rice from over 2.57 lakh hectares of land this time for the northern region following repeated bumper production of the off-season crop in recent years.
Under the programme, the farmers were to produce 27,302 tonnes hybrid variety Aus rice from 9,255 hectares land, 4.76 lakh tonnes high yielding variety Aus rice from 2.04 lakh hectares land and 58,705 tonnes local variety Aus rice from 44,139 hectares land.
However, they have cultivated Aus rice on over 2.38 lakh hectares land, which is about 19,000 hectares or 7.40 percent less than the fixed cultivation target of 2.57 lakh hectares.
Of them, hybrid variety Aus rice has been cultivated on 12,062 hectares land, high yielding variety on 1.98 lakh hectares and local variety Aus rice on 28,319 hectares.
The farmers are now getting excellent yield rate of 3.74 tonnes rice per hectare for hybrid variety, 2.90 tonnes for high yielding variety and 1.60 tonnes rice for local variety.
To make the Aus cultivation programme successful, the government distributed seeds, fertilisers and irrigation costs worth Taka 6.26 crore special incentives among 50,740 farmers of 11 districts in the region this season.