Photo : BSS

RANGPUR, Apr 21, 2025 (BSS) - After harvesting last week, farmers in Rangpur region have produced 50,018 tonnes of wheat this Rabi (2024-2025) season.
 
Meanwhile, farmers are happy to get a better market price of their newly harvested wheat between TK 1,600 and TK 1,750 per maund (40 kg) this season.
 
Officials of the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) said that this time, a target of 60,685 tonnes of wheat production had been set for the five districts of the region from 17,148 hectares of land.
 
“However, farmers had finally cultivated wheat on 14,187 hectares of land, which is 2,961 hectares or 17.27 percent less than the fixed target for cultivation of the crop this time,” Rangpur region’s Agriculture Extension Department Deputy Director, Md. Afzal Hossain told BSS.
 
The fixed farming target of wheat marked a shortfall due to crop diversification and cultivation of vegetables, maize and other high-valued crops on more lands in the region.
 
“There was no incident of blast disease during the crop cultivation and farmers have got a good yield of 3.53 tonnes of wheat per hectare this time,” he said.
 
Earlier, farmers produced 60,200 tonnes of wheat from 17,167 hectares of land during the last 2023-2024 Rabi season and 60,685 tonnes from 17,148 hectares of land during the previous 2022-2023 Rabi season in the region.
 
“The government supplied quality wheat seeds and provided the latest technologies, training, fertilizers and other inputs to farmers who achieved a better wheat production this season,” Hossain said.
 
The farmers mostly cultivated high yielding wheat varieties like 'Bijoy', 'Pradip', 'Sotabdi', BARI Gom25, BARI Gom26, BARI Gom27, BARI Gom28 and BARI Gom29 using conservation agriculture (CA)-based technologies to enhance production.
 
Talking to BSS, Independent Award (food security) 2018 winner Agriculturist Dr. MA Mazid said farmers got a better yield of wheat as they cultivated the crop mostly adopting latest conservation agriculture (CA)-based technologies. 
 
“Adoption of the CA-based strip tillage and bed planting methods in sowing wheat seeds using seeder machines increases wheat yield reducing need for irrigation compared to the full tillage methods and largely saving labour costs,” he said. 
  
On the other hand, farmers are sowing high quality, disease resistant and stress tolerant varieties of wheat seeds timely using the lowest cost CA-based technologies after harvesting short duration Aman rice to get bumper output.
            
“However, the fixed farming target for wheat was not achieved this time due to crop diversification in the region,” Dr. Mazid added.  
 
Talking to BSS, farmers Mostafizur Rahman, Altaf Hossain and Abdul Hakim of Badarganj upazila in Rangpur expressed satisfaction over the excellent production of wheat and its present market price.