Tuesday 12 May 2015

Giving pepper a concrete leg up

B Gopalakrishna Bhat, a progressive farmer from Enmakaje village in Kasaragod district of Kerala, on his pepper plantation. Pepper is being cultivated as a mono-crop with cement poles as support structure for pepper vines AJ Vinayak
B Gopalakrishna Bhat, a progressive farmer from Enmakaje village in Kasaragod district of Kerala, on his pepper plantation. Pepper is being cultivated as a mono-crop with cement poles as support structure for pepper vines AJ Vinayak
Traditionally pepper is grown as an intercrop in plantations. However, a farmer from Enmakaje village, bordering Karnataka and Kerala, has begun growing pepper on a trial basis as a mono-crop with cement poles as support.
Some three years ago when there was a rumour on the likely ban on arecanut, B Gopalakrishna Bhat from Enmakaje village in Kerala’s Kasaragod district thought of diversifying his crop. He felt that pepper plantation was the ideal choice then.
He, along with his neighbour K Mahesh Bhat, approached IISR (Indian Institute of Spices Research) in Kozhikode and got Thevam, Shakti, Srikara and Panchami varieties for planting two years ago.
Cement poles
Gopalakrishna Bhat finalised to grow it as a mono crop and decided to install cement poles as a support for the vines. (Traditionally farmers use arecanut or other trees as a support for pepper vines).
Bhat told BusinessLine that he planted around 100 pepper saplings on a trial basis in his plot.
To a query if using cement poles would be a costly proposition, he said he invested around Rs. 1,000 for a single sapling, including the cost of the cement pole with 4-inch diameter. The hollow cement pipes have been filled with concrete to make it strong, he said. The height of the poles in his trial plot ranges from 8 ft to 15 ft.
P Chowdappa, Director of the Kasaragod-based Central Plantation Crops Research Institute, toldBusinessLine that cement poles can be used for support in pepper plantations. However, people normally do not venture for that as it involves additional investment.
Investment details
Farmers will get more income from multiple crops in same unit area if pepper is cultivated as inter-crop, he said.
Agreeing with him, Gopalakrishna Bhat said the investment will be one-twentieth of his trial plot in the case of pepper as an inter-crop. Highlighting the advantage of pepper as a mono-crop, he said harvesting takes a longer time when it is grown as an inter-crop.He is hopeful of getting around 4 kg of pepper a year from a single plant in this model. He has maintained a spacing of 8x8 ft in his plot.
Yield & disease
On the average yield as an intercrop, he said he got around 5 kg a plant as in intercrop in arecanut plantation, because the plant can go up to a height of 20 ft with arecanut plant as a support. That is not the case in this trial plot, he said.
Stating that this is the 13th month of pepper cultivation as a mono-crop, Bhat said some plants of Thevam variety have begun to bear the berries. The result is not replicated in other varieties, he said.
Narrating his experience, he said around 1,000 saplings can be planted on an acre of land in this model.
On diseases in the plantation, Bhat said he did not face any issue of disease in the last 13 months. He follows the package of practices being suggested by the IISR.
Mahesh Bhat – who planted IISR saplings as intercrop in his farm – said that one of the reasons for disease-free growth in Gopalakrishna Bhat’s plot could be the plain land where the mono-crop cultivation is being taken up. There is no scope for water logging in such a land unlike the arecanut plantations, he said.
(This article was published in the Business Line print edition dated May 13, 2015)

Source: BusinessLine

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