Farm families in Sitakunda, Chattogram, are earning 300,000 to 500,000 taka a year by producing seedlings in poly sheds using modern methods. Farmers have been benefiting for the past two or three years, advised regularly by the upazila agriculture office and sub-assistant agriculture officers in the field.

Seedlings raised this way are not damaged and bacteria cannot enter. The roots stay strong and intact, whereas seedlings pulled from soil often have torn roots, do not survive long and yield poorly. In poly sheds, seedlings stay disease-free and the risk of death is much lower. As word spread, wholesalers began coming from different places, taking hundreds of thousands of seedlings away by truck.

Md Abu Taher, owner of Naima Agro and Nursery in Nunachhara, Sitakunda municipality, has two sheds, one of which holds about 30 species of seedlings in the new poly-shed system. After all costs he can earn 300,000 taka a year, with two harvests a month.

Md Imtiaz Hossain, owner of Sitakunda Agro and Nursery in South Rahmat Nagar, Muradpur union, has profited from poly-shed seedlings for three years. Production peaks from August to January. He earns about 500,000 taka a year after costs, and wholesalers and farm families take his seedlings to Chattogram, Feni, Cumilla and remote villages.

Upazila agriculture officer Md Habibullah said seven entrepreneurs in the upazila produce seedlings in poly sheds and earn hundreds of thousands of taka. Roots used to be damaged when seedlings grown in soil were lifted, but that risk is gone and mortality has fallen, so vegetable production has doubled compared with before, he said.

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