Farmers produced 66,283 tons of wheat after completing its harvest last week in all five districts of Rangpur agriculture region during this 2020-2021 Rabi season.
Officials of the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) said farmers produced 328 tons of more wheat this season against the production of 65,955 tons from 18,726 hectares of land during the last 2019-2020 Rabi season.
“The DAE had fixed a target of producing 69,630 tons of wheat from 19,550 hectares of land for the region this season,” Additional Director of the DAE for Rangpur region Agriculturist Khandker Abdul Wahed said.
However, enthusiastic farmers finally brought 21,160 hectares of land under wheat cultivation getting various assistance and incentives from the government and exceeded the fixed farming target by 1,610 hectares or 3.12 percent this time.
“Farming of the less irrigation water consuming cereal crop of wheat has become popular among farmers as they achieved excellent production with lucrative prices in recent years,” he said.
The DAE, Bangladesh Agriculture Development Corporation, Bangladesh Agriculture Research Institute (BARI) and other agriculture related organisations extended assistance to farmers to make the wheat farming program successful this time.
“The government supplied quality wheat seeds and provided latest technologies, training, fertilisers and other inputs to farmers who finally achieved a better wheat production this season,” Wahed said.
The farmers mostly cultivated high yielding wheat varieties like ‘Bijoy’, ‘Pradip’, ‘Sotabdi’, BARI Gom25, BARI Gom26, BARI Gom27, BARI Gom28 and BARI Gom29 using conservation agriculture (CA)-based technologies to enhance production.
Senior Coordinator (Agriculture and Environment) of RDRS Bangladesh Agriculturist Mamunur Rashid said farmers are showing more interest in wheat farming adopting latest technologies being provided by the government in recent years.
“Adoption of the CA-based strip tillage and bed planting methods in sowing wheat seeds using seeder machines largely increases wheat yield reducing need for irrigation compared to the full tillage methods and largely saving labour costs,” he said.
In the past, wheat production was being affected due to adverse impacts of high temperature on its farming from flowering to ripening stages and late sowing of seeds after harvesting late varieties of Aman rice and use of low quality local seeds.
“However, farmers are sowing high quality, disease resistant and stress tolerant varieties of wheat seeds timely using the lowest cost CA-based technologies after harvesting short duration Aman rice to get bumper output,” Rashid said.
Deputy Director of the DAE for Rangpur Dr Md Sarwarul Haque said there was no recurrence of blast disease this time and farmers got excellent yield rate of 3.29 tons of wheat per hectare in the region.
Farmers Echhahaq Ali, Mohsinur Rahman, Alam Hossain and Ariful Haque of different villages in Rangpur expressed satisfaction over excellent yield rate of wheat and its present market price.