Agricultural entrepreneur Harunur Rashid Musa has built a commercial avocado orchard at Kakbaria village in Kotchandpur, Jhenaidah. With the right varieties and care, he says, one bigha can earn five to seven lakh taka. Dinajpur TV describes it as the country's first and largest commercial avocado orchard.
He started in 2016, inspired by a research paper by a former director general of agriculture. The orchard now covers about 10 bighas, including two-and-a-half bighas beside his house and a separate plot of one-and-a-half bighas elsewhere, and has 14 to 15 avocado varieties.
The orchard is now 11 years old. The trees have grown as large as big local mango trees and need little complicated care, he says. Each tree yields up to about 60 kg of fruit on average.
To avoid chemicals and protect the fruit from birds and insects he uses fruit bagging and pheromone traps. Avocados usually stay green even when ripe, and taste nothing like sweet fruit, more like butter or boiled egg yolk.
The fruit, which originated in Mexico about 7,000 years ago, spread through Africa and Asia, to Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia, and now fruits in Bangladesh too.
Photo: B.navez / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: Dinajpur TV
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