Hill Jhum Paddy Grown on Plain Land in Jhenaidah Yields Well at Low Cost

Jhum paddy is usually grown on hill slopes, but in the 2025 aman season a farmer in Jhenaidah, a district of the south-western plains, grew it on flat land. Abdur Rahim of Ramnagar village in Kumrabaria union of Jhenaidah Sadar upazila planted the hill variety known as Sentu Pajam 21 on a patch of fallow high land and, using little irrigation, fertiliser and pesticide, got what he called an excellent crop. Jagonews24 reported the field on 14 November 2025. Because a hill variety gave a high yield on plain land, the district agriculture department said it saw a new possibility in it.

The state news agency BSS had reported the same field a day earlier, on 13 November 2025. It said Rahim sowed the seed in that year's transplanted aman season on high homestead land, and that the seed had come to him by courier from Sherpur, the district where the variety was bred.

Rahim became interested after seeing the unusual way this paddy is grown on the internet. He ordered just 3 kg of seed online and planted it on fallow land. "I made contact online and bought 3 kg of seed. It came to my address by courier service, and I planted it," he told Jago News. "This paddy did not need even 10 per cent of the irrigation that aman paddy needs. Fertiliser and pesticide use was very limited. The production cost is Tk 7,000 to 8,000 per bigha."

He said he had planted the paddy on 10 katha of land and had also given seed to his nephew and one other person, who got excellent yields too. "This paddy gives a higher yield at half the cost of aman," he said. "I will get about 25 to 26 maunds of paddy from my 10 katha. I plan to grow it on more land next season." The cost and the expected harvest are the farmer's own figures from his field, not an official crop-cut measurement.

Elahi Mondal, another farmer of Ramnagar, passes the field every day on his way to and from his own land. "My neighbour Abdur Rahim grew this paddy," he told Jago News. "I thought he had planted it on fallow land beside a bamboo grove and it would not yield. He did not irrigate it, he did not fertilise it, so I thought it would not do well. Now I am amazed at the yield. You rarely see such a high yield at such a low cost. Next season I will grow this paddy too."

Md Nur-e-Nabi, the agriculture officer of Jhenaidah Sadar upazila, said the office had been surprised by the way the crop was grown. "The land where the paddy was grown is high ground," he told Jago News. "The farmer did not need extra irrigation as aman does, and he used fertiliser and pesticide only sparingly. The grain is somewhat coarse. The cultivation and the yield on plain land have been very good. We found more than about 300 grains on each panicle. We hope cultivation of this paddy will increase."

Speaking to BSS, the same officer said this paddy does not need extra irrigation like aman, needs only limited fertiliser and pesticide, and even suffers less from insect attack. He said the department was surprised to see how it grew and yielded on Jhenaidah's flat land, and hoped its cultivation would spread.

The report gives no recommended rate of fertiliser or pesticide for the variety, and none is given here. A farmer who wants to try it should first ask the upazila agriculture officer or the union's sub-assistant agriculture officer about seed, sowing time and crop care for his own land.

According to the agriculture department, as both reports quote it, Sentu Pajam 21 is grown in Sherpur, Jamalpur and Netrokona and in hill areas, on the slopes of hills and hillocks, and is cultivated as jhum paddy in the aman season. It was developed by Sentu Kumar Hajong, a farmer of Nalitabari upazila in Sherpur, and the variety carries his name. The upazila officer described it as a high-yielding variety made mainly by crossing local Pajam with the Indian Ranjit (Pajam) paddy.

Earlier reports from Nalitabari tell the same story of its origin. Prothom Alo reported on 18 December 2021 that Sentu Hajong had spent five years crossing local Paijam with Indian Ranjit (Paijam) and released the new variety in 2019, naming it Sentu-21 after himself. Its rice is slender, much like Paijam. The paper said local Paijam yields 35 to 40 maunds an acre while Sentu-21 yields 60 to 70 maunds, and that the crop takes 150 to 155 days from seedbed to harvest against Paijam's 160 days. It needed little care and suffered less from insects, the report said.

The variety spread from farmer to farmer. In the 2021 aman season, according to that report, between 1,500 and 2,000 farmers in Nalitabari grew Sentu-21 with seed taken from Sentu Hajong and four other farmers, and the seed was also on sale in local markets. A farmer of Bhatpur village told the paper he had harvested 60 to 65 maunds an acre the previous season at a cost of Tk 12,000 an acre and sold paddy at Tk 1,300 a maund. The Nalitabari upazila agriculture officer said then that the office would grow the paddy as a trial in the next aman season and, depending on the result, send it to the Seed Certification Agency for official approval.

Dhaka Mail reported on 15 December 2022 that Sentu Paijam, as the variety is also called, had caused a stir in Nalitabari, and that a farmer of Andharupara village had harvested 50 to 60 maunds an acre of dried paddy from it. Sentu Paijam then sold at Tk 1,350 to 1,450 a maund in the local market, the farmer said. Protidiner Bangladesh reported on 10 May 2023 that farmers had grown Sentu Hajong's varieties on several thousand acres in Nalitabari and Jhenaigati in Sherpur and Haluaghat in Mymensingh.

Sentu Hajong's work began with a short course. Prothom Alo reported on 10 February 2023 that in 2005 a non-government organisation taught poor farmers how to cross rice and develop new varieties, and that he joined its three-day training workshop. Bangla Tribune had reported in September 2020 that the training came from Caritas. Since then, the papers said, breeding new kinds of paddy had become his life's work.

He crosses the plants by hand, grows the seed of each cross in pots, saves seed from the plants that do well, and then grows it in small plots on about 65 decimals of land in the aman season. In 2023 Prothom Alo described a small thatched room in his yard holding 25 to 30 plastic pots, sacks of seed paddy and a large drum of 270 kinds of paddy samples collected over 17 years, each bundle labelled with its variety, height, duration and type. The room held 23 kinds of paddy that he had bred himself, the paper said. Dhaka Mail reported in December 2022 that a new variety took him about seven years and that he had laid out 370 trial plots on his own land.

His first widely known variety came before Sentu-21. Prothom Alo reported that in 2016, after seven years of work, he crossed BR11 with the local Chinishail and produced a new type that yields 45 to 55 maunds an acre where ordinary paddy gives 30 to 35, stands three and a half to four feet tall and does not lodge easily in wind; it takes 140 days. Protidiner Bangladesh gave the name of this type as Sentushail. The Nalitabari upazila agriculture office said that variety alone had been grown on six and a half thousand acres in the upazila that year.

Nalitabari, where he lives, is an upazila of Sherpur district on the border with the Indian state of Meghalaya. Banglapedia lists the Garo, Hajong, Hodi, Mandai and Koch among its indigenous communities and paddy, jute, wheat, potato, mustard and vegetables among its main crops. The Hajong are an indigenous people living on the land at the foot of the hills in greater Mymensingh, in places such as Sreebardi, Jhenaigati, Haluaghat, Nalitabari and Durgapur. Banglapedia notes that, unlike many hill peoples of the north-east, the Hajong were not traditionally jhum farmers: they have long lived by ploughing settled land.

The papers that profiled Sentu Hajong said the government had not tested his varieties in field trials and that he had received no official recognition. Asked about this, the then director general of the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) described the route in 2023. A farmer can develop a variety, he told Prothom Alo. After trial cultivation in different places, the seed must be given to the Seed Certification Agency, which tests the variety in ten regions of the country. The results show whether it is better than the varieties already in use. If it is, the case goes to the National Technical Committee and, after review, to the National Seed Board. Once the board approves it, the variety is entered with its name in the government gazette. He said Sentu Hajong could apply if he wished.

According to Banglapedia, the Seed Certification Agency was set up in 1974 at Gazipur as a regulatory department of the Ministry of Agriculture. Its job is to make sure farmers get quality certified seed. Among its tasks are inspecting seed crops in the field, testing seed lots in its laboratories at Gazipur and Ishwardi, and coordinating the evaluation and release of varieties of notified crops. Certification follows methods approved by the National Seed Board.

BRRI itself, by Banglapedia's account, is an autonomous research body established in 1970 at Joydebpur in Gazipur to develop rice varieties and the methods to grow them in the country's different rice environments. In 2023 the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Nuclear Agriculture, who had visited Sentu Hajong, told Prothom Alo that the farmer pollinates and selects rice by hand, that the grain, plant type, yield and taste of his paddy would first have to be examined, and that the institute would test his paddy because rice bred by local farmers needs to be evaluated.

Jhum, also called jhuming or shifting cultivation, is the slash-and-burn farming of the hills. Banglapedia describes it as the most common form of cultivation in the hill areas of Bangladesh, still practised in the Chittagong Hill Tracts on sloping hills outside the reserve forests. Seeds are sown after the first rain in April. With a broad-bladed knife called a dao, small holes are made across the field and a mixture of crop seeds is placed in them: rice, maize, millet, sesame, cucumber, pumpkin, melon, string bean, cotton, banana, ginger and turmeric. Little weeding is done, and the crops are harvested one after another as they ripen between July and December.

Banglapedia puts the area brought under jhum at about 20,000 hectares a year and the soil lost at 100 to 250 tonnes per hectare. It says the rotation, once at least seven to eight years, has fallen to three to four years, and the fallow that once lasted ten years to two or three, because of population pressure, the loss of farmland to the Kaptai reservoir and large-scale settlement. The results are falling soil fertility, erosion, deforestation and silting of rivers and lakes, and lower yields.

The 2025 jhum harvest in the hills had come in shortly before the Jhenaidah report. Prothom Alo reported on 20 September 2025 from Khagrachhari that farmers clear the hill in mid-April after the first rains of Baishakh, sow paddy on the flatter parts with bananas, chillies, turmeric, ginger, beans, gourds and other crops in rows, and see the paddy begin to ripen in September. The Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) counted 1,124 hectares of jhum paddy in Khagrachhari in the 2024-25 season with an output of 1,540 tonnes, and expected more than 1.6 million kg in 2025. BSS reported on 27 September 2025 that BRRI had grown its aus varieties BRRI dhan24, BRRI dhan26 and BRRI dhan27 and two lines under testing as a trial in Khagrachhari's jhum fields, and that the DAE's deputy director said BRRI dhan24 and BRRI dhan27 gave the highest yields.

Most people picture rice in flooded fields, but a whole class of rice is grown without them. A 1993 FAO and International Rice Research Institute book, Rice in Human Nutrition, describes upland rice as rice grown in fields that are not bunded, prepared and seeded under dry conditions and dependent on rainfall for moisture. Upland farming ranges from the shifting cultivation of forested hills that are cleared and burned to large mechanised farms; in between are the sloping hill fields of hundreds of thousands of the poorest rice farmers, which suffer serious erosion and frequent drought.

The book says some 13 per cent of the rice area of South and Southeast Asia was upland, and that yields are lowest in this ecosystem. It also notes that blast, a fungal disease, is a particular problem in upland rice. By contrast, rain-fed lowland rice is grown on puddled soil in fields with dykes that hold 0 to 50 cm of water, and irrigated rice is kept flooded, partly to suppress weeds.

Rahim's field was neither a hill slope nor an irrigated paddy. The upazila officer described it as high ground and BSS as high homestead land, and the officer said the farmer had not needed the extra irrigation that aman takes. Neither report recommends the variety for other land; the officers said only that they hoped its cultivation would increase.

Jhenaidah is a district of Khulna division covering 1,964.77 sq km, according to Banglapedia. It borders Kushtia to the north, Jessore and the Indian state of West Bengal to the south, Rajbari and Magura to the east, and Chuadanga and West Bengal to the west. Its main rivers are the Gorai, Kumar, Nabaganga, Chitra, Bhairab, Kobadak, Betna and Kaliganga. The 2011 census counted 1,771,304 people. It became a district in 1984 and has six upazilas, of which Jhenaidah Sadar is the largest. Agriculture is the main source of income for 67 per cent of its people.

Jhenaidah Sadar upazila, where Ramnagar lies, covers about 470 sq km and has 17 unions, Kumrabaria among them. The Begabati and Nabaganga are its main rivers. Banglapedia gives agriculture as the main source of income for 60.12 per cent of its people and lists paddy, jute, sugarcane, wheat, barley, betel leaf, potato and vegetables as its main crops, with paddy, jute, betel leaf, banana, date molasses and vegetables among its exports.

Aman is the main monsoon rice crop of the district. According to DAE figures reported by BSS and Dhaka Times on 20 September 2025, aman was grown on 104,000 hectares in Jhenaidah's six upazilas that season, with a production target of 564,139 tonnes. The same reports said farmers in all six upazilas were struggling with rot at the base of plants and with stem borer attack that turned tillers white despite repeated spraying, which raised their costs. The DAE's deputy director in Jhenaidah told BSS then that the office had received no serious reports of pest attack so far, that field staff were advising farmers, and that fields would be inspected.

As the 2025 aman harvest began, BSS reported on 9 November 2025 that the government would buy 600,000 tonnes of parboiled rice, 50,000 tonnes of sun-dried rice and 50,000 tonnes of paddy from the aman crop, at Tk 50, Tk 49 and Tk 34 a kg, between 20 November 2025 and 28 February 2026. The food adviser said aman costs less to produce than boro because the rains of the season cut the cost of irrigation, sometimes to nothing.

Photo: Reaid Hossain / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24, BSS (Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha), Prothom Alo, Dhaka Mail, Protidiner Bangladesh, Bangla Tribune, Dhaka Times, Banglapedia, FAO (Rice in Human Nutrition, 1993)