Black plum harvests revive Barguna farmer’s glories
A former presidential award winner for cultivating watermelon and vegetables is now making a name in Barguna with his black plum trees, that too selling off most of this season's Tk 15 lakh-worth harvests through Facebook.
In 1988, the then agriculture minister had come over to see for himself the produce before the award was presented in 1992, said Ahsan Habib taking pride in his work.
And rightly so. His black plum trees bore no fruit in the first two years on being planted in 2008.
But he doubled down on nurturing them, for which now great clusters of the oblong fruit are the first things to greet the eye at his Koraitala village home, just five kilometres away from the Barguna district headquarter.
The black plum tree is also commonly known as Malabar plum, Java plum, jamun or jambolan. What is less known is its scientific name, Syzygium cumini.
The juicy sweet and mildly sour fruit trees start flowering from March to April and the fruits develop by May or June.
During the harvest season, Habib collects the fruit from his 43 trees almost every day. At the season's start, he was able to get Tk 8,000 per maund (one maund equals around 37 kilogrammes).
As more fruits arrive in markets, prices go down. Most recently, he sold a maund for Tk 2,000. Now that the trees are fully grown, Habib has to bear little expense.
His daughter, Humaira Akter, was the first to make a Facebook post about the season's first arrivals on a group named "Barguna Bee" before word quickly spread.
She said 95 per cent of the sales were made online and they had made deliveries both in Barguna city and around the country, including Barishal, Dhaka and Rajshahi.
Packaging for transportation was an issue as the fruit becomes quite soft when ripe, she said, hoping to adopt better methods in future.
Seeing the success, many of the area's farmers now seek Habib's expertise in the cultivation.
The fruits available in the market are all of native tree varieties as there is no cultivation of improved or hybrid ones, said AKM Mostafa Zaman, a professor of the Department of Agronomy at the Patuakhali Science and Technology University.
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