Preparations for the coming Eid are already under way, and buyers are crowding the cattle markets. Ready to shake up those markets are Feni's Lal Bahadur and Sultan. Raised on the Jahan Agro farm in Feni, Sultan weighs 900 kg and Lal Bahadur 700 kg. Buyers are flocking to the farm to see them and the other animals, large and small.

Engineer Imtiaz Chowdhury Ador, co-managing director of Jahan Agro, said the farm gives priority to natural feed in raising its cattle. They hope Sultan and Lal Bahadur will make a stir in markets across the country, beyond the district's borders.

Jahan Agro Limited started in 2017 on 12 acres at Chowdhury Rastar Matha in Chhagalnaiya municipality in Feni, beside the Dhaka-Chattogram highway, with local and foreign cattle, goats, buffaloes, ducks, peacocks, dogs and various other animals and birds.

The farm's owner, prominent businessman Arefin Azad Chowdhury Badal, said he used to keep dogs and various birds as a hobby at his small farmhouse in Dhaka, and was a regular visitor to farms around the country. Eventually, aiming to create jobs in his home area and to increase production of eggs, milk and meat, he started Jahan Agro by collecting more than 200 dairy cows of different breeds.

For the past four or five years, besides dairy cows, he has been preparing local and foreign breeds of bulls and buffaloes for the Eid of sacrifice. He is at the top of Feni district by number of very large cattle raised. Various companies and traders from inside and outside the district take the milk his farm produces. Milk and animals from the farm are sold at somewhat lower prices to residents of Chhagalnaiya upazila.

Jahan Agro currently has more than 600 animals, including sacrificial cattle and dairy cows. For the coming Eid, he has prepared more than 400 cattle, from eight-maund Sahiwals to animals of 6–7 maunds. The animals are fed silage made from maize the farm grows itself, straw, bran and green grass. He built the farm with his own money. He raises the animals entirely naturally, without harmful vitamins or steroids, and 17 people work on the farm regularly.

He also said that because the prices of cattle feed, treatment supplies and medicine have risen, fewer sacrificial cattle have been produced and stocked in the Feni region this year than last year. "We hope sacrificial animals will sell at better prices than in other years. But since Feni district borders India, we are somewhat worried about getting a fair price for cattle raised on local farms because of Indian cattle smuggled in illegally," he said.

Feni district livestock officer Dr Md Anisur Rahman said Feni has more animals than it needs. People in Feni prefer to sacrifice animals individually, and even on that basis there is no fear of a shortage.

He added that, as elsewhere in the country, sacrificial animals will be supplied to Feni from the north-east of the country, and farms in Feni are now also raising large cattle of good breeds.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.