Hello Friends,
August was a good month from the production perspective. We seemed to be getting a good crop of healthy tomatoes from the two acres we planted. Perhaps we should have sown our crop about two months earlier to have got the crop before the monsoon but otherwise things were fine.However there had been a nagging concern in that we have had to be using pesticide sprays quite regularly right from the time of transplanting of the seedlings to have been able to get this good crop. We need to assess the cost of inputs seriously because some of the pesticides we used were really expensive especially the one we were asked to use against a kind of wilt which could be seen to start developing in the morning and by evening the plant would have collapsed.The spray was a miracle cure but a very expensive one !
Brinjal's we had two varieties the long green ones seemed to repeat the cycle of a very healthy first month followed by an overwhelming attack by Root and Shoot Borer worms the ones sought to be addressed by BT Brinjal. The long green variety seemed to succumb more easily than the purple variety. As per our consultants advise we kept a steady barrage of pesticide sprays but going by the trend the long green variety may not survive the pest attack.
So we had two acres of yielding brinjal's and two acres of tomatoes as we traversed August to September. Bananas were all doing well and coming up well and our first planting of Bananas were maturing and getting ready for harvesting and the bunches looked good with the possibility of each bunch being in the region of thirty to thirty five kilos.
On the price realization front for tomatoes it was not a happy story because unlike in the previous year the price never picked up by Mid August as expected and we were selling ex farm at prices below four per kilo on an average. We had twenty tons of tomatoes sold in August at this price.
In conclusion August was a month of mixed results..good harvests..disappointing price realizations..a rising concern on input prices. We are going to be doing a lot of study on alternate modes for pest control like using natural pesticides, deployment of pheromone traps for Brinjal to see how we can address the issues of concern.
Below are some visuals for the period..
Till next time then.
Rajesh
August was a good month from the production perspective. We seemed to be getting a good crop of healthy tomatoes from the two acres we planted. Perhaps we should have sown our crop about two months earlier to have got the crop before the monsoon but otherwise things were fine.However there had been a nagging concern in that we have had to be using pesticide sprays quite regularly right from the time of transplanting of the seedlings to have been able to get this good crop. We need to assess the cost of inputs seriously because some of the pesticides we used were really expensive especially the one we were asked to use against a kind of wilt which could be seen to start developing in the morning and by evening the plant would have collapsed.The spray was a miracle cure but a very expensive one !
Brinjal's we had two varieties the long green ones seemed to repeat the cycle of a very healthy first month followed by an overwhelming attack by Root and Shoot Borer worms the ones sought to be addressed by BT Brinjal. The long green variety seemed to succumb more easily than the purple variety. As per our consultants advise we kept a steady barrage of pesticide sprays but going by the trend the long green variety may not survive the pest attack.
So we had two acres of yielding brinjal's and two acres of tomatoes as we traversed August to September. Bananas were all doing well and coming up well and our first planting of Bananas were maturing and getting ready for harvesting and the bunches looked good with the possibility of each bunch being in the region of thirty to thirty five kilos.
On the price realization front for tomatoes it was not a happy story because unlike in the previous year the price never picked up by Mid August as expected and we were selling ex farm at prices below four per kilo on an average. We had twenty tons of tomatoes sold in August at this price.
In conclusion August was a month of mixed results..good harvests..disappointing price realizations..a rising concern on input prices. We are going to be doing a lot of study on alternate modes for pest control like using natural pesticides, deployment of pheromone traps for Brinjal to see how we can address the issues of concern.
Below are some visuals for the period..
Till next time then.
Rajesh
