At Bindhara village in Panchbibi upazila of Joypurhat, whole fields have gone under Chinese watermelon this season. Rafiqul Islam Shahin of Mohammadpur union and a handful of smallholders planted the crop on trellises, and the results have their neighbours watching.
The fruit
Small, sweet and dark-skinned, the variety is known as Black Baby. It is grown year-round on a macha — a trellis of bamboo and GI wire — and is being talked of as a crop with a future.
The arithmetic
- The crop takes only 60 days.
- A bigha needs 50 grams of seed, costing about Tk 3,000.
- A bigha yields 1,200–1,500 fruits in 60 days, 4–4.5 tonnes in all.
- At Tk 30 a kilo that is Tk 120,000–135,000 a bigha — several times what the same land earns under other crops.
In the field
Beds are laid under polythene mulch, the vines trained up the trellis, and the fruit hangs in the shade of its own leaves. Rafiqul says the demand from traders has outrun what he can grow.
A short crop, a high price and a method any farmer with bamboo and wire can copy.
Photo: Sunrise over a watermelon field near Cox's Bazar — Milli Tami / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
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