Sweet success of a jobless youth
While the coronavirus pandemic continues to cause havoc on different sectors including agriculture globally, an increased awareness of consuming vitamin C -- to fight the virus -- has helped a lemon farmer in Jashore become self-reliant.
In 2019, Right before the pandemic broke out in the country, unemployed youth Selim Tuhin -- son of late Rakib Uddin Biswas from Jola Amedabad village in Sadar upazila -- collected one thousand saplings of seedless lemon from Mymensingh and planted those on his four bighas of land.
He initially spent Tk 60 thousand on the saplings at the advice of one Abdul Barek Lal Dadu of Mymensingh, but Selim's monthly earnings now have reached between Tk 6 to 7 lakh.
Roughly ten thousand pieces of the lemon are now being plucked every day from his orchard and shipped out to different markets in Jashore as well as in Dhaka.
Before his seedless lemon cultivation took flight, the SSC graduate Selim had suffered losses in his previous business ventures and had been looking after ancestral property.
He recently extended his lemon orchard on to twelve bighas of land and prepared six more bighas to add to the orchard. He said he was planning to extend the orchard further on a total of one hundred bighas of land eventually.
The variety of the seedless lemon Selim has been growing is called 'BINAlebu-1', which was released in 2016 by Bangladesh Institute of Nuclear Agriculture (BINA).
Rafiqul Islam, chief scientist of Horticulture Division at BINA, said some of the best features of BINAlebu-1 are that the fruit is full of vitamin C and the plant produces fruit all year round.
The fruit is juicier and its fragrance is more attractive than most other lemon varieties available in the market.
The plant starts producing fruit ten to eleven months after planting and it bears fruit several times a year, the scientist said, adding that a plant bears around 250 to 300 fruits in each harvest season until it reaches 15 to 18 years of age.
Selim said he was also earning Tk 80 to Tk 100 from each sapling of BINAlebu-1, which he has been producing at his orchard using grafting method.
Making a lemon orchard with 120 saplings on one bigha land would need organic fertiliser only and the total cost would be around Tk 15 to 20 thousand, he also said.
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