Weekend Farmer - Season 2

With a fairly successful Season-I, I was fairly confident of paddy plantation in season II. I was ready to shrug off my amateur experiments and sort of roll up my sleeves and get some knowledge on how to do this better.

Over the last season, I had researched on new techniques for rice production and wanted to use the same in my field. I even got a very good grade of paddy for sowing. From the 1.5 acres last season, I decided to scale it up to ~5 acres.

But alas, plans are only as good as they are executed. And execution risks in agriculture are much more than what we city folks can imagine. First I had to face a labor that did not understand the different technique that I wanted to transplant the crop. So I ended up paying more than twice for them to take up the assignment. The weather played truant that encouraged growth of weeds. After 3 weeks, my field had weeds taller than paddy. Labor was unavailable for de-weeding the field and I decided to leave the 3.5 acres and concentrate only on 1.5 acres. Thus a straight loss of 70% in production. In the end, I got paddy of about 200 kg and rice of 75 kg.

During this time, I also tried setting up a small vermicompost unit. Procured special earthworms that are voracious eaters of organic waste matter, from the agricultural department .

Vermicompost Pit

Ginger, that I had planted in the end of season I, also seemed to be going the paddy way. Initially not a single one sprouted for the first month. However with the advent of rains, the sprouting started. In hindsight I realised that I had given less water to ginger in the initial days. By the 9^th month after planting, ginger was looking good. I had initially planted around 3 kgs of ginger and I was able to harvest around 22 Kgs of ginger. Not a bad yield for a first timer.

The vegetable production in season II was not too different from season I. I added few more vegetables like French beans, tomato to the vegetable portfolio. After the failure of karela in season I, the yield in season II more than compensated for that failure.

By the time season II ended, The sole labour that was helping me execute my plans left. This impacted the work. (And now all that hype about attrition in the corporate world started to make sense;-) )

Now that I had 2 years of farming experience under my belt, labour issues got me thinking about how I could utilise my knowledge of technology and improve yield as well as reduce dependence on manual labour.