Unseasonal rain worries Sylhet farmers amid harvest time
S A Shofiee, Sylhet:
Rural towns in Sylhet region are busy harvesting paddy. However, many farmers are worried about the adverse weather. They are worried about harvesting paddy as the rain has started. The concerned department says that it is possible to harvest the crop ahead of time.
For the people of Haor, Baishakh means the festival of harvesting golden crops from dawn to dusk. But the adverse weather conditions at the beginning of Baishakh have dampened that joy.
Mortuza Ali, a resident of Tahirpur in Sunamganj district. Although he cultivates 20 bighas of land, the paddy is not fully ripe and he has not been able to use scissors on the golden paddy. On top of that, this farmer is worried about the adverse weather.
Mortuza Ali said, ‘If the sun is shining, I have less trouble. If the paddy is not harvested, if there is a sudden big flood, everything will be submerged.’
Like Mortuza Ali, about 2.8 million farmers in the Sylhet region are now worried about the same. Although some have started the rice harvesting festival, it is much later than other years. Because the weather has changed and the rice has not ripened in many places.
One of the farmers said, ‘We are so busy because of this sun and rain. Otherwise, we would not have had to harvest rice. We are harvesting quickly because of the rain.’
Workers are also worried about harvesting rice due to adverse weather conditions. They also say that if such a situation occurs, their income will also decrease along with that of the landowners.
On the other hand, many farmers are harvesting and threshing nutritious rice in a festive atmosphere and filling it into silos. They are quite happy with the bumper yield of the produced crop.
This year, 497,119 hectares of Boro rice have been cultivated in the four districts of Sylhet division. Of which 53,411 hectares have been harvested, which is 10.75 percent of the total production. However, the Department of Agriculture hopes that it will be possible to harvest the haor paddy before the disaster.
Additional Director of the Sylhet Department of Agricultural Extension Bimal Chandra Som said, “The necessary instructions have been given to the farmers by giving them necessary advice and by harvesting the paddy quickly after it ripens. And our field level officials are in the field. We hope that if our weather is favorable, we will exceed our Boro paddy target.”
This year, the target of producing 20 lakh 51 thousand tons of paddy has been set in the Sylhet region. The market value of which is about 10 thousand 250 crore taka.