With salt water all around and salt in the soil, growing vegetables was close to impossible for coastal families in Shyamnagar upazila, Satkhira. Now women there hang vegetables on trellises in their yards, grow ginger in sacks and raise spinach, aubergine and okra on pits and beds. Barta24's Satkhira correspondent Mrittunjoy Roy reports.
Dipika Rani, a homemaker in Kultali village of Munshiganj union, says vegetables used to die from the salt. After training from the NGO LEDARS, she dug a pond in her yard that stores rainwater all year, fresh water she uses for drinking, housework and irrigating her vegetables. She has used 12 methods, including beds, mulching, sacks, vertical towers, drip irrigation on the towers and light traps, and sends more than 10 to 12 kg of vegetables to market through her husband every day.
Iti Biswas of the same village started after watching Dipika. Her seedlings died several times before she succeeded; she now grows okra, Malabar spinach, ginger in sacks, bitter gourd, bottle gourd, pumpkin, spinach and red amaranth. The methods are set up so that salt water does not touch the soil, she says, and the rainwater stored in the pond is what she irrigates with.
Climate change has made salinity, erratic rain, waterlogging and drinking-water shortages major obstacles to coastal farming, made worse by shrimp enclosures and saltwater reservoirs. Ashalata, sub-assistant agriculture officer for Atulia union, says most of the upazila's land is saline and that her office works with LEDARS to spread salt-tolerant varieties, trellising, mulching and sack farming.
LEDARS executive director Mohan Kumar Mondal says that with traditional farming failing on the south-west coast, they train marginal farmers to produce salt-tolerant rice and vegetable seed. For eco-friendly farming they teach how to make organic manure and bio-pesticides, and buy farmers the troughs, earthworms and cow dung so they can later make them on their own.
Combining local knowledge with science, he says, they have installed earthen towers, drip irrigation, mulching, sex pheromone traps and solar light traps. On the salty coast, a family's vegetables and extra income now depend largely on the rainwater held in a small pond in the yard.
Source: Barta24
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