On about five bighas beside her home in Shoulmari Sunagar village, Jaldhaka upazila, Nilphamari, Khadija Akter has built an orchard of coffee, rambutan, cocoa, dragon fruit, passion fruit and other local and foreign fruit. After costs it earns her Tk 3.5 lakh to 4 lakh a year, the state news agency BSS reports.
After her husband Nazrul Islam died in 2014, she ran his stationery business at Kaimari bazar and the household alone and saw both sons through university. She turned to farming in 2018: a coffee lover, she took her elder son's advice, cleared fallow land next to the house and planted Arabica seedlings brought from neighbouring Kishoreganj upazila. Rambutan, cocoa, dragon fruit and passion fruit followed, and the trees were bearing within three years.
Today coffee grows on three bighas and rambutan, dragon fruit, passion fruit, cocoa and other trees on two. Passion fruit vines climb a trellis at the entrance, there is a pond on one side, mango, lychee, tamarind and bay leaf trees in the yard, and she also raises ornamental fish fry. She has been selling coffee for about six years, and last year sold some 400 kg of rambutan at Tk 1,000-1,200 a kg.
Her income will grow as the rest of the trees come into bearing, she says. She heard plenty of taunts for running a business and an orchard at once, but never looked back, and has won several awards as a woman farm entrepreneur. Others in the village are now taking up fruit growing at home after seeing her success.
Mosa. Homaira Mondol, deputy director of the district Department of Agricultural Extension, said the department had helped Khadija with advice, inputs, seedlings and machinery, and that other women and men in the area now hope to follow her.
The report is from the BSS Nilphamari correspondent.
Photo: Afifa Afrin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: BSS
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