Farm field schools help keeping the ‘oily spot’ at bay

At farmer N D Patil’s garden, the oily spot disease destroyed 70 per cent of his produce from his 700 trees, but he was able to get up to Rs 4 lakh from the remaining crop by this March. “Every Sunday since last August, we were able to keep the oily spot at bay because of the classes. We kept the garden clean, learnt to spray the right amounts of bordo mixture( fungicide) and burn the infested parts to limit its spread,” said Patil.

In a survey conducted in 2006-07, agriculture officers found that 1,587 farmers had been affected by the oily spot disease out of which 690 were small farmers and 872 were marginal farmers while 25 were big farmers. Compared to Sangola, Nashik, Jat or Nashik, Atpadi, which is responsible for nearly eighty per cent of the state’s exports, did not face the brunt of the oily spot.

“But if not for these schools, one would not see pomegranate crops here. It has been a process of tremendous awareness building among farmers. The effect of these classes will be more visible from the next season,” said B T Patil, agriculture supervisor.

Oily spot spread more like the polio. Even if a garden nearby is left out from spraying, its effectiveness is reduced greatly. Common spraying is important, Patil said and partial success was seen two months ago when about 18 small farmers who had formed a community were able to earn Rs 2 crore worth revenue in exports.

Among the few women farmers, Bharti Vasant Kharat saw 100 per cent oily spot infestation at her 4.5 acre pomegranate garden after the 2007 rains. Following the FFS guideline, she cut and pruned the affected branches, leaves and fruits and a bornfire was erected to smoke out the disease — oily spots cannot survive in temperature beyond 53 degrees Celcius.

“The next season, I was able to reduce the infestation to 50 per cent. However, my harvest was not in time for exports and I got a low price comparatively from the local market — about Rs 3 lakh for my 400 odd pomegranate trees,” said Kharat, one of the two women farmers at the FFS in Nilkharanji Gaon, Atpadi tehsil.

Atpadi, around 90 km from Sangli city, suffered from a long bout of poor monsoons from 1998 to 2004, which resulted in farmers uprooting 70-80 per cent of their pomegranate trees for lack of water. However, Good rainfall in 2005, encouraged re-plantation in large numbers to such an extent that now the tehsil has 3,000 hectares under pomegranate.

In the last four years, farmers have tended their crops for exports to US, Eurpoe and Dubai, which gets them more than twice the money in return. And yet this tehsil has not one irrigation scheme. “Farmers here are totally rain dependent. Years of drought have seen some structured soil and water conservation projects, but some rich farmers even get water tankers from elsewhere to tend to their crop. Irrigation is the next big problem here, after oily spot,” said Agriculture officer S G Nikam.

Last August, nine villages were selected for Atpadi’s FFS programme, where 30 most progressive farmers were chosen for lessons on the best package of practices for pomegranate crop. Now, a government resolution has made it compulsory for representation from all communities from June onwards.

“From this year we have to ensure that all villages have a FFS running. We hope to see better results this year,” Nikam said.