Onion is emerging as a promising new cash crop for the farmers of Kalapang in Monggar’s Saling Gewog. Given its daily demand across the country, more farmers are turning to large-scale onion cultivation. This shift follows the introduction of a new high-yielding bulb onion variety by the Agriculture Research and Development Centre in Wengkhar. The variety is known for both its productivity and superior quality.
Meet 29-year-old Sonam Gyeltshen, a young farmer from Kalapang in Saling Gewog.
He has stacked over 1,000 kilogrammes of onions recently harvested from his farm.
Together with his wife, Sonam harvested over 2,000 kilogrammes of onions from one acre of farmland.
They carefully sort the onions to maintain quality before sending them to market. He supplies onions weekly to the Gyalsung Academy.
The onions fetch Nu 60 per kilogramme, and remarkably, three bulbs can weigh over a kilogramme.
With growing population in the nearby towns such as Gyalposhing and Lingmithang, market access has not been an issue for him.
“If we depend on India for onion, during the monsoon, onion production in India drops and the price reaches 150 ngultrum per kilogramme. We can produce in the country. I do not know whether the farmers are not getting support or the youth are not staying in the village and it is mostly the elderly and they cannot work. The onion production is same like India.”
And this year, Sonam is expecting to earn a good income.
“We can generate some income from selling onions. In a season, we used to earn between Nu 20,000 to 30,000 when we did not cultivate on large scale. In this situation, if I can sell the two metric tonnes of onion, I can earn more than one hundred thousand ngultrum.”
Like Sonam, there are five other farmers who took onion farming to commercial scale in Kalapang.
According to the Agriculture Research and Development Centre in Wengkhar, almost 1,500 packets of bulb onion seeds were distributed to nearly 360 households in Monggar, under a cost sharing scheme supported by CARLEP.
Close to 60 metric tonnes of onion were harvested from 14 villages and Kalapang recorded the highest yield with almost nine metric tonnes per acre.
Namgay Wangchuk, Monggar
Edited by Tshering Zam
