If not for fodder, farmers in Mendrelgang Gewog in Tsirang would gradually do away with maize cultivation. Maize, once a staple diet for the people there, is now losing its significance with vegetable farming becoming a lucrative business.
One common scene at the Riserbu chiwog is farmers washing vegetables and preparing it to be transported to the capital or nearby towns.
82-year-old Sukh Maya Ghishing helps her children. She said they need money to feed the family and vegetable farming is profitable. She cultivates radish, chilli, spinach and broccoli in her two and a half acres of land.
“Earlier we use to grow maize abundantly. It is one of our main our diet. We don’t have paddy fields here. Now the focus is more on vegetable farming rather than growing maize. We grow maize as fodder for our cattle and sometimes for consumption.”
Sukh is not alone. Some of her neighbours have totally given up growing maize.
“I have over four acres of land where we cultivated maize in the past. Now we are growing varieties of vegetables in large scale because it fetches good money. We can now easily buy fodder from the market and little amount of maize is enough to feed our cattle because from the vegetables too, we get fodder,” Meena Ghishing, a farmer, said.
“There is no benefit from growing maize for me now as I own cattle. We have started growing vegetable for cash and in a week we can earn up to Nu 30,000,” Renuka Rana, another farmer, said.
Meanwhile, Tsirang Dzongkhag in the current plan is planning to achieve over 90% maize self-sufficiency. Therefore the dzongkhag supplied over 400 kilograms of better quality maize seeds to farmers this year. But market forces will determine the fate of maize cultivation.
