the goan I network
PANAJI
St Estevam is buzzing with activity. Tractors from far away Maharashtra invading its fields and readying them for sowing paddy this upcoming Kharif season on a scale never seen in recent decades.
The village’s experiment with community farming has borne enough fruit to prompt Ilha Verde Farmer’s Club to double their efforts to scale up paddy cultivation acreage from 50 hectares (5-lakh square metres) last year to 100 hectares of khazan fields this season.
Having learnt lessons from last year’s experience, the Club has staggered its ploughing operations this time into three stages.
“Last year the transplanting machines and tractors were getting stuck often. So this year we are first ploughing with cultivator about six inches deep. The second ploughing will be done with a roto-vator at the onset of the monsoon and the third just before launching the paddy transplantation operations,” Ilha Verde’s president, Nestor Rangel said.
In 2018, an MB plough was used which went deep and caused problems for the transplanter as it got stuck several times during the transplanting operations, Rangel added.
Currently, the first round of ploughing of almost the entire 100 hectares is complete using tractors and service providers from across the border in Maharashtra as no service provider in Goa had the facility of attaching cultivators to the tractor.
Simultaneously, the club is currently in the process of preparation for the nursery, where paddy seeds are sown in thick rows on patches of land and the saplings will eventually be transplanted on the entire 100 hectares.
It may be recalled that St Estevam was the cynosure of all eyes after its youth got down to mapping the villages khazan land and took up for paddy cultivation around 50 hectares of khazan land which lay fallow for over three decades.
Rangel, an electronic engineer who long switched professions to farming, was the prime motivator of the project along with the local parish priest Fr Eusico Pereira and another youth popularly known in the village as Dudush.
Apart from bringing the fallow land under cultivation, saving it from the prying eyes of real estate players was another motivating factor for the project.
First a bunch of youngsters just out of college mapped ownership of the lands by downloading the form I & XIV. The group then went about their village and elsewhere contacting the owners for consent to cultivate their fields and eventually implementing the unique community farming
experiment.
The club also tied up with officials of the State agriculture department who provided technical support, scientific advice and also facilitated the Ilha Verde Farmers Club to avail financial subsidies as per existing schemes.
Fr George Quadros, a saleisian priest based in South Goa and a pioneer in mechanisation of paddy transplantation operations in Goa, also collaborated with the St Estevam project.
Post harvesting, part of the produce was sold by the club as paddy and the balance was processed at rice mills in Ratnagiri into Goan brown rice which was marketed through word of mouth across the State and received overwhelming response. The Goa Green Brigade also assisted the Ilha Verde Farmers’ Club in managing the logistics of marketing the finished product.
According to the club, although the first attempt wasn’t a roaring commercial success, the scaling up of operations from 50 to 100 hectares coupled with the improvisation adopted this year will add to the financial success this time round, Rangel and his team are hoping.
