The farmers and officials concerned are predicting a satisfactory production of mustard following various government steps and favourable climatic conditions in the region this Rabi season.
According to the sources concerned, the cash crop is now growing well everywhere in the region including its vast Barind tract predicting bumper productions.
More farmers are being encouraged to cultivate the crop as they got excellent yield and market price during the last harvesting season as most of the big corporate organisations manufacturing mustard oil after procuring mustard seed from the farmers directly.
Harvesting will begin next month and the farmers will bring most of the same land under Boro farming after completion of harvests of the crop, farmers and officials in the Department of Agriculture Extension (DAE) said here Monday.
The DAE has set a target of bringing 1,77,885 hectares of land in eight districts of the region during the current season but the farmers cultivated the crop on 1,74,951 hectares of land.
Besides the DAE, various other research and development organisations like BARI, BARC, BADC and many NGOs have taken adequate steps in collaboration with other departments this season to achieve the fixed production targets.
BARI has released 16 high yielding mustard seeds and two of those- BARI Sharisha-15 and Tari-7 have become popular among the growers’ level, particularly in barind tract comprising 25 upazilas of Rajshahi, Chapainawabgonj and Naogaon districts.
The agri-departments and NGOs have provided quality seeds, necessary inputs and trainings on the latest technologies to make the programme successful.
The landless and marginal farmers have also brought vast tracts of the sandy char lands under mustard cultivation his time in the Ganges basins and the crops are growing excellent everywhere now in the region.
Deputy Director of DAE, Rajshahi Nurul Amin and Principal Scientific Officer of Regional Wheat Research Center Dr Israil Hossain said the region has immense prospects to achieve self-reliance in oil seed productions.
In this regard, they underscored the need for using the latest agro-technologies and disseminating proper knowledge to the farmers for increasing mustard seed to achieve self-reliance in edible oil to reduce the dependence on import.
They laid special emphasis on the need for increasing mustard, groundnuts, soybean and palm farming to move further forward in achieving the goals using the latest agro-technologies in the country’s food granary of the northern region.
Farmers of the region always produce huge surplus quantities of rice, potato, maize, vegetables and they should explore tremendous potentialities to increase production of oil seeds through proper crop diversification and land management, they said.
They urged for cultivating hybrid varieties of oil seeds invented by BARI and BINA in between the gap of harvesting the short duration Aman paddies and Boro farming period to get the maximum productions and quality seeds. -BSS, Rajshahi
