Farmers they say are born weathermen. Across the world, farming communities have relied on their own instincts to predict the weather and accordingly launch each facet of their farming activity in their fields, for generations.
Goa is no different but this year, in the just concluded kharif season, farmers were completely foxed by the freaky monsoon through the life of their paddy crop, including the harvesting chore.
Call it climate change, or whatever else you want, Goa’s farmer miserably failed to take the right call and appropriately time their paddy growing activities, be it ploughing, sowing, transplanting de-weeding or spraying their paddy fields.
The July-August floods had khazans and other farm lands hit by floods with their standing crops submerged for a damaging fortnight. Whatever survived those floods was further hit by the freaky rains in late October associated with the cyclone Kyarr which did skirt the coast of Goa but battered it with rains.
The result: Yields hit rock bottom
and losses for many farmers have sky-rocketed, in several cases, pegged at ‘90 per-cent crop loss’.
Colossal losses
The farmers in Bardez suffered heavy loss to paddy yield due to excessive and untimely rains. Almost 90 percent of the average yield was lost and farmers couldn’t even recover the cost of harvesting. Some of them left their fields in disgust and did not even bother to harvest to reap the fruits of their labour.
“We used to take home around 25 quintals of paddy every year but this year we have hardly managed to get about five quintals” said Dinesh Shirodkar.
Cyclone Kyarr destroyed the yield as harvesting got delayed and eventually stray cattle destroyed whatever crop was standing, he added.
He said, the harvesting machine got stuck in the ground due to damp soil which was the root cause of the delayed harvesting.
“Those who’s turn to use the machine came last suffered the most losses,” Shirodkar added.
August mayhem
For seven days in August, Goa was battered and bruised with incessant rains and squally winds which delivered the worst blow to the toiling paddy farmers. Their standing crops in low-lying, fertile khazan expanses were submerged in the flood blamed on the non-calibrated release of water from dams at Anjunem and Tillari by the Water Resource Department (WRD), piling on more trouble on the already distressed farmers.
Areas that faced the brunt were Ibrampur in Pernem, Chicalim in Colvale, St Estevam, Divar, Vanxim, Chorao, as well as Amona.
Goa’s largest community farming project in St Estevam was unrecognisable.
While in June 2019, the community farming volunteers had made a video explaining the project, and calling on people for aid, a few days ago they released another video depicting the state of their fields - a water body and villagers seen rowing a boat and diving in comfortably indicating the depth.
The 10 lakh square meters expanse of khazans which they so painstakingly brought under paddy cultivation close to Mandovi river, were lying six feet under flood waters for a week.
“Even if the water recedes completely, there is little hope of salvaging the paddy crop,” a crestfallen Nestor Rangel, who heads the Ilha Verde Farmers Club and pioneered the community farming project in St Estevam said.
He had said, they were staring at possible losses of around Rs 35 lakhs which they already pumped in for the sowing operations at a rate of around Rs 2.5 per square meter.
Last year, was the first time the St Estevam community farming project was launched on nearly 50 hectares that had been left lying fallow for four to five decades. It was a huge success story, riding on which the Club had doubled the coverage to 100 hectares this year.
Similar was the case of the community farming project of Carmakhazan in Mapusa, where John Lobo and
nine other co-villagers started community farming on 6,000 square meters
of private land.
Lobo said the group was trying to stay positive and would not give up easily, although their crops are under threat.
“First the crops were attacked by peacocks and pigs. Just as they were recovering from that, the heavy rains came in and submerged the fields for a week. There is still water in the fields,” Lobo had said.
The area brought under cultivation is prime land and was marked as settlement zone under the now scrapped ODP-2021 plan for Mapusa.
The ten residents who were fighting real estate lobbies eyeing the land and the community farming project was a strategy they adopted.
Vishwambar Gawas, a farmer from Navelim in Bicholim, meanwhile had predicted destruction of around 80% of his crop and banking heavily on assistance from from the government.
Meanwhile, areas in South Goa far away from any dams, had also faced the brunt of the August deluge.
Santano Rodrigues from Curtorim, who had cultivated around 25,000 square meters had informed that nearly a third of the cultivated area was damaged with the flooding.
According to agriculture expert and organic farming promoter Miguel Braganza, however there were “very good chances” of the crops surviving the August flooding blow if the water drains out fast.
“If the water recedes quickly, the crops do not rot. They will be okay,” Braganza had said and a significant portion of the flooded fields did
recover.
According to Braganza the last time crops were affected by a natural disaster on this scale was almost a quarter of a century ago - in 1996.
“Back in 1996, the crops were first hit by drought and then by floods. Even then, the crops had survived,” he said. He however added that the extent of flooding this year was much higher.
Nonetheless, Braganza had no hopes of the crop surviving where fields were submerged with saline water like the khazans, adding however that even these crops could grow back but give much lower yields.
