Ask tomato growers in Madanapalle or mango farmers in Chittoor what they fear most and the answer is not drought but a bumper crop, because when everyone in Andhra Pradesh's Rayalaseema region harvests well at once, prices collapse, The Hindu reports.

In July, 13,000 tonnes of tomatoes reached the markets in one day and the price fell to ₹14.70 a kg, with lower grades at ₹8 to ₹10; after paying for crates and transport, farmers were left with barely ₹3. In kharif 2025, growers in Annamayya and Anantapur districts made distress sales at ₹4 a kg against a production cost of ₹6. Mango growers fare no better: in 2025 a minimum support price of ₹12 a kg plus a ₹4 subsidy was announced for Totapuri mangoes in Chittoor but never reached the market yard, and in 2026 prices fell from ₹120 in May to ₹30 in June.

Horticulture scientists point to three problems. The region is rain-fed, groundwater is falling and farm ponds, check dams and micro-irrigation are patchy; when canal water from Handri-Neeva arrives late, sowing is delayed and harvests bunch together. Marketing is weak: on a peak day 300 farmers rush to Madanapalle or Punganur in the same hour, with no advance buyers, no grading and weak farmer producer organisations, while middlemen who advance crates set the price. And tomatoes have a two-day shelf window and mangoes ten, yet the region lacks even basic cold storage or pack houses.

"Incidents of tomatoes dumped on the Madanapalle-Punganur Road in 2025 were not about overproduction, but about nowhere to store and no one to buy," said Rajasekhar, a 38-year-old farmer from Gurramkonda.

The ₹1-lakh-crore Rayalaseema Integrated Horticulture Hub is meant to fix this. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman are to lay its foundation stone at Madanapalle on 2 October. The plan envisages ₹40,000 crore from the Centre under the Purvodaya scheme and ₹60,000 crore of private investment across 201 clusters in 10 districts, each with collection centres, grading, cold storage and market links.

Kothur Babu, president of the Chittoor District Mango Producers' Association, said that if implemented properly, tomato farmers could grade and store produce for three to four days and send it to Chennai, Bengaluru or Hyderabad as demand dictates, while mango could gain pulp units and export pack houses. Farmers remain wary: they recall promises of cold storage and a tomato industry made in 2014 and say they are still waiting.

Photo: எஸ்ஸார் / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Source: The Hindu, Agriculture