The harvesting of apples in Kashmir has started in right earnest with orchardists and farmers actively engaged in the selection and plucking of the fruit.
The inclement weather and different types of crop-related diseases have posed unforeseen challenges to the region’s horticulture sector and department, enough for them to predict that this year’s apple crop yield may turn out to be less than what it was last year.
Brighter Kashmir visited an apple orchard in Parsu village in Shopian district to get a sense about apple harvesting this season.
“For the last few years, apple growers have been facing tough times and experiencing heavy losses because of unfavorable climatic conditions and presence of unknown diseases. The pesticides that are in use currently have been ineffective,” a grower in Parsu village told Brighter Kashmir.
He said the majority of the people in the village are involved with horticultural activities.
The growing or harvesting of apples, he said, is a professional activity and requires a particular skill level. “Farmers and orchard growers here work very hard to ensure they have a good crop. Our focus is on quality rather than on the quantity harvested because we are very facing competition from external sources involved in similar activity”.
Apple orchards in Shopian are spread across 26,231 hectares. The district is also known as the “Apple Bowl” of Jammu and Kashmir.
The wholesale fruit market in Shopian has emerged as an agent of change in the last few years, bringing a smile to the faces of both farmers and fruit growers in south Kashmir.
“As you can see in our orchard we are currently growing Kullu Delicious apples. Then we will focus on Denman Island apples. Apples in Shopian are grown at high altitudes and hence they are very sweet, citrus filled and famous in south Kashmir. Our harvested crop is sent to wholesale markets in Delhi, Amritsar, Hyderabad, Calcutta, Jammu, Maharashtra and Bengaluru,” the grower said.
When asked about the challenges being faced by the apple industry, he said, “Previously we experienced several problems in the horticultural sector here, but now, with the availability of cold storage facilities, we are able to preserve the apples for longer periods of time. We are controlled by a demand and supply circle, and therefore, in the past we had to send everything out in bulk to save the crop and earn from it as much as we could. Now, we are in a position to stagger the movement and shipping of the crop because of cold storage facilities. We also have a much younger lot of people working with us in the horticultural sector and they are very professional in their duties,” he said.
“The major change that I see now is that we are able to grow and harvest high density apples. We are able to graft these apples better as opposed to the traditional variety of apples which are no longer in great demand. There is some support for the horticultural sector, but more needs to be done,” he added.
Director Horticulture Kashmir Ghulam Rasool Mir told Brighter Kashmir that though the final figures are not in yet, they were expecting an apple yield that was less than last year.
“The reason for this is that during the blossoming stage of the apple harvest season, we were hit by heavy rains. We require a proper temperature for the apples to flourish --- a minimum and a maximum temperature that has to exist to ensure best results,” he said.
“We also require pollinators to facilitate a good apple harvest in the event we don’t have the required minimum or maximum temperature. From time to time we do issue advisories to the farming and orchard communities to alert them about inclement weather or change in temperatures so that they can take appropriate and corrective steps to save their crops,” added Mir.