BSS, Rajshahi :
Commercial farming of strawberry has started gaining momentum in Rajshahi region as its cultivation is easier and highly profitable.
Strawberry, a succulent fruit popular in different parts of the globe, is also gradually becoming popular among the local people. Farmers’ level extension of strawberry farming can bring a new horizon to the agriculture sector in the region.
Prof Dr AKM Rafiul Islam, president of Bangladesh Strawberry Association, said, “Strawberry cultivation is as easy as growing potato or eggplant. Saplings can be planted in rows during the period between November and December every year.”
The plants start flowering within one month of plantation and fruits can be collected till March.
“Each plant bears around 250 to 300 grams of fruit and some 6,000 plants can be grown on one bigha of land,” Dr Islam said, adding with farmer-level price of around Taka 600 per kg, the commercially potential fruit will have a bigger market locally and globally and benefit farmers enormously.
Now, a large number of people, mostly unemployed youths, have become dependent on strawberry farming to earn a living, as its cultivation is easier and more profitable than other crops, he said.
The youths are supplying strawberry to different markets across the country as the soft fruit is being used in preparing ice-cream, jam, jelly, pickles, chocolates and biscuits.
Prof Dr Manzur Hossain, who is pioneer in the country’s strawberry research, variety innovation and growers’ level farming expansion, said Bangladeshi variety strawberry has been adjudged as the world’s best strawberry.
“We have innovated three varieties of strawberry through applying tissue culture method,” he said.
“In the demonstration field, all those were found adaptive to the region’s soil and environmental conditions,” Dr Hossain, a professor of Department of Botany, Rajshahi University, added. He has been multiplying the variety on his own horticulture farm for the last couple of years.
