"Year-round or summer tomato yields for six to seven months. The market is good, and it sells for over 100 taka a kilogram. Wholesale, a 25-kg crate fetches 3,000 taka. You can earn eight to ten times more than with winter tomato. On one bigha, the cost is 50,000 to 60,000 taka and sales can reach 500,000 to 600,000 taka."

So said Md Abul Kalam, a farmer back from abroad, in his year-round tomato garden in Kushtia Para village, Borer Char, on the Brahmaputra basin in Mymensingh Sadar. Tomatoes hang in rows in his shed-grown garden. Borer Char is famous for tomatoes, sending tomatoes worth hundreds of millions of taka across the country each year.

Abul Kalam spent 13 years in Singapore. He came home on leave in January 2020 and could not return because of the coronavirus. Work had taken him to Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand, where he saw advanced, low-cost farming, and he had planned to farm if he ever came home. "Agriculture is our life; I am a farmer's son," he said.

He grows BARI Hybrid Tomato-8, which fruits all year, but plants must be grafted or they will not last. Seed is sown in January, with bitter brinjal seedlings raised at the same time as rootstock. In the rainy season the soil is wet and fungi attack tomatoes; grafting onto bitter brinjal gives strong roots that water cannot damage. The Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) encouraged him and supplied seed, and he began after visiting year-round tomato fields in Netrokona and Sylhet with BARI officials.

The crop needs little pesticide and 97 per cent of plants live six to seven months. It is grown under sheds, covered with polythene in the rains. Ordinary tomato yields for a month or a month and a half, 15 to 20 kg per plant, but year-round plants grow seven to eight feet tall, flower and fruit continuously and can give up to 50 kg each, he said. According to BARI, the variety can be harvested 35 days after fruit set, yields 35 to 40 tonnes per hectare, sets fruit at high temperatures without hormones and bears 40 to 45 fruits per plant.

He also imports modern farm equipment from India. But the road from Shambhuganj to Borer Char is very poor: the area sends about 2 billion taka of vegetables a year, with 200 to 250 trucks a day in winter, and delays cost farmers fair prices, he said.

Mymensingh Sadar upazila agriculture officer Tahmina Islam said tomato covered 1,150 hectares at Borer Char last year and 800 acres so far this year, and year-round tomato is growing in popularity because off-season fruit earns farmers more.

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