Why care for a job when you got a malta orchard?
When Ashish Kumar Roy was a third year honours student, he decided to take up the hobby of growing fruits.
He even envisioned making money from selling the fruits grown in the orchard at his village home, in Durgapur village of Pirojpur Sadar upazila.
But, in 2015, when he proposed to his father, Gourango Lal Roy, that he wished to use his one and a half-bigha land for the orchard, his father opposed the idea as his livelihood depends on the land where he grows paddy.
Despite the initial disagreement, Ashish convinced his father to allow him to plant malta fruit saplings on the land and also to dig a pond to rear freshwater fish.
Ashish, now 29, said he has a total of 300 malta trees of Bari-1 variety in his orchard and the trees started to flower in two years after planting.
Very similar to orange, malta is a fruit species in the family of citrus fruits.
A malta tree produces about 40 kilograms or one maund of fruit each year and "I have been reaping full harvest of malta over the last three years."
The sweet and delicious malta grown in his orchard is high in demand and wholesale buyers from across the country are buying the fruit straight from the orchard, for around Tk 100 a kilogram, he added.
The favourite species of fish he has been breeding in the pond are two high-breed varieties of Koi (climbing perch) and Shing (long-whiskered catfish), he also said.
Now that his orchard is a profitable venture, Ashish, with a goal to expand the orchard, has procured 10 kathas of land in the vicinity.
By this time, Ashish has completed his education and has only around three months to prepare and apply for a government job. He does not, however, worry about getting a job any longer as he is now quite capable of making a decent living on his own, from the orchard.
Sharing his future plans, Ashish said he would like to extend the business further, by cultivating different other profitable fruits.
With that objective in mind, he has been growing saplings of dragonfruit that also sells at high prices at markets now. He said he would go into fully fledged cultivation of the fruit next year
Reminiscing the early years of his fruit farming, Ashish said his father now has complete confidence in him and he extends his all-out support to decisions Ashish make regarding the business.
According to Department of Agricultural Extension data, malta is being grown on 125 hectares of land at 992 orchards in Pirojpur this year, with Pirojpur Sadar, Nazirpur and Nesarabad upazilas leading in production of the fruit.
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