Scientists testing 'mystery' seeds to determine their origin and variety
CHANDRAKANT PARGIR and MANISH SONI, Contributing writers
Parmeshwar Rajwade has become well known among farmers in his part of Chhattisgarh for the high yields he has gotten from new seeds. (Photo by 101Reporters.com)
KOREA, India -- Parmeshwar Rajwade struggled for years to make a living on his small farm in Kanchanpur, a village in the Korea district of India's poor eastern state of Chhattisgarh. Then one day in 2013 a sales agent from a seed company handed him a 2kg packet of unnamed foreign wheat seeds that promised a 30% higher yield than local varieties.
Rajwade, who farms 2.4 hectares of land, sowed the wheat on a small plot of barely a fifth of a hectare. The results were startling: The seeds yielded 500kg of wheat when he harvested the crop four months later.
The following year, Rajwade sowed twice the area with the same wheat variety and reaped a yield of nearly 1 metric ton. His output was 2.5 times the average wheat yield in Chhattisgarh. Unsurprisingly, he increased the sown area to 1.2 hectares in 2015, producing 3 tons of wheat, and in December 2016 he sowed the seeds on his entire farm, harvesting more than 5 tons.
"The grain of the new wheat variety is bigger in size, and it weighs more than our traditional Indian varieties," Rajwade said.
To this day, the wheat has not been identified. But that did not stop Rajwade from offering seeds to other farmers -- a common practice in India when yields are good. By 2016, the unidentified foreign seeds were planted by most of the 50 or so farmers in Rajwade's village.
"An agriculture expert once visited me after spotting it growing in my field and he told me it was an Australian variety of wheat," said Rajwade, who is now celebrated in his village. Sales of larger quantities of the seed are now helping him to put his two children through school.
Rajwade said that two government-run agricultural research institutes, the Baikanthpur and Ambikapur agricultural research centers, had offered to test the seed, and appealed for more farmers to adopt it for better returns.
His nephew, Akhand Partap, farms the same foreign wheat on 0.4 hectares. He said that 300 of the 400 farmers in his village had also adopted it. "Due to its straw quantity, size of grain and softness while baking, it's become popular in the area," Partap said.
The best part, he said, is that growers do not need to go to market to buy it. Farmers are happy to pay Rajwade 25 rupees ($0.39) for a kilogram. The Indian variety of wheat is sold at 20 rupees a kilogram.
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