By Mononjay Mandal from Satkhira
‘If you want to get good yield, you need to have suitable and healthy seeds. Good yields can never be expected unless one has good, matured and quality seed. If the seed immature, then no matter how much we care, the crop yield will not come in accordance with our expectation.’ The above statements belong to woman farmer Tulsi Rani Mandal of the coast.
Tulsi Rani has gained a wide reputation as one of the initiator of organic food producers in her village. She produces crops adopting sustainable agriculture her lands and homesteads all year round. She meets her family consumption and the rest she sells in the market that earns her additional cash. Her son Babu and husband Parimal Chandra Mandal extend helping hands to improve her food production. Tulsi Rani, a farmer from Barakupat village in Atulia union of Shyamnagar upazila of Satkhira, has been producing a variety of seasonal crops in her 70 decimal of homesteads.
Tulsi Rani farmed potatoes, tomatoes, pickles, eggplants, copra, coriander, fennel, onion, garlic, uchche, ladies finger, puishak (spinaches) and sweet pumpkin. She also planted marigold flower as a new crop in her homestead. Last year, she conserved the best marigold seeds and this year she herself planted those seeds in her lands. According to her expectation, she will be able to sell a single flower with TK 3 or 4 and selling all flowers that she produces could ensure her a mentionable cash she asserts.
However, Tulsi Rani produces and uses organic manure in crop cultivation. She conserves every seeds of the crops that she farms in her lands and homesteads. This leads her not to be dependent on market seeds to produce crops in the following seasons. She collects the healthy and matured crops from her garden and conserves the seeds of those matured crops for farming in the next seasons. Along with various vegetables, she cultivates chinikani (A local variety of rice) in the rainy season and uses this rice in various family and social festivals.
Tulsi Rani has set up an egg-laying chicken farm with TK one 1 lakh, a loan taken from from BRDB. There are four and a half hundred chickens in her farm. She sells eggs once a week to a dealer in Munshiganj Bazar. In addition, alongside doing all sorts of household works Tulsi Rain makes a mentionable contribution in agriculture works.
It is to be mentioned that BARCIK has provided supports to Tulsin Rani to make her endeavor a success one. The organization recently provided her nets to fence her vegetable garden so that livestock could not do harms to her plants.
Translated by Silvanus Lamin
