“The Poush 24 (January 8) frost destroyed my entire potato crop over 10 ropanis of land,” says Goma Adhikari, a Lamdihi farmer.
She describes the morning as unusually chilly.[break]
“My front garden was white – completely covered with frost,” she recalls. “By noon, the frost had melted and then the potato plants started wilting.”
She had hoped it was just her vegetable garden, and the potato yield in her field was unharmed. Unfortunately, the news of the frost destroying the potato crops of the entire village reached her before she even had time to check her fields.
“After that, I didn’t go to the fields for three days. I couldn’t bear it,” she says. “Later, I somehow mustered up the courage to go and consoled myself that it wasn’t just me. The whole village had to go through the loss.”
Saraswati Bhetwal, 47, another local farmer and the village social worker, says this was the first time she had seen such a frost and encountered this big of a loss in potato farming.
“We’ll probably have some potatoes left but the yield won’t have grown as much and will be worth very less in the market,” says Bhetwal.
The farmers of Lamdihi and some other neighboring villages in Kavre switched to more profitable cash-crop farming over the last 10 years. Accordingly, the economic condition of the villagers has progressed over the years. The villagers are now able to better provide for their families, send their kids to good schools and support further education. But new problems have started threatening their livelihood already.
“The rainfall has been much lesser and more delayed over the past four or five years,” says Bhetwal. “There are more pests now, the water sources are drying up, reduced to almost half of its original volume and then there’s this kind of sudden frost that destroys our crops.”
Photo Courtesy: Nabin Baral
The farmers of Lamdihi are still hopeful of a better second cycle of potato crop.
Bhetwal and Adhikari farm their own family plots. The ones who are hardest hit are always poor farmers like Arjun Bhujel, working in leased lands.
“We have to pay Rs 7,000 as annual rent per ropani,” says Bhujel who farms eight ropanis of land belonging to Sabitri Adhikari of the same village, “Add to that the costs of manure, pesticides and labor, the investment adds up to more than one hundred thousand Rupees.”
Located in the Jhiku watershed area, Lamdihi previously had enough water for irrigation from the rainfall, springs and the Jhiku stream. Bhujel, whose family has been farming for generations, says that because people nowadays cannot depend on just the rainfall or the small irrigation channels, they sometimes have to use water pumps to irrigate their fields.
“The pump uses up almost Rs 300 worth of fuel per hour to irrigate half a ropani of land. That’s a lot of extra cost we need to bear.”
With all three of their sons away in Kathmandu working and barely earning for themselves, Bhujel’s family here in Lamdihi has himself as the head, his wife, a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter. And the mere amount they get out of selling vegetables is their only means to sustain themselves.
“It’s from selling potatoes that we get our bulk of earning, “says Nani Maiya Bhujel, Arjun’s wife. “So when the frost destroyed the crops, it was like we lost the ground beneath our feet.”
Still hopeful of a healthier yield in the coming three months though, they’ve started planting a second cycle of potato crops for this year.
When asked about how they would overcome the loss they’ve had with the previous planting, Nani Maiya sighs and says, “We can only pray that the second yield can lessen our burden. But we’ve already gone into debt for this year and we have to accept it.”
In drier villages of Kavre like Dadagaun, which doesn’t fall in the watershed area, it’s even more difficult to sustain farming, say locals. Fortunately for them, they hadn’t planted potato yet and the frost didn’t affect much of their other crops.
Senior climate expert at ICIMOD, Erling Val Damer, and a local farmer at Dadagaun, Buddhiman Tamang, both stress that there would be less risk of frost damage had the farmers avoided to plant the potatoes too early and stuck with the local agricultural calendar. Even traditionally, the farmers wouldn’t have started planting the potatoes before the first week of February to avoid the frosts, affirms Tamang, but nowadays that’s when farmers start preparing for the second round of potato plantation in a year.
Val Damer explains that the winter weather of the mid-hills in Nepal are subject to the influence of several dynamic climate systems, and the weather conditions they produce include variations of all kinds that happen now and again. Farmers throughout the Himalaya have learnt about these conditions over the generations and established a local agricultural calendar which he says people pay very less attention to nowadays with the availability of more crop varieties and market demands.
“A few nights’ winter frost is normal in mid-hill areas,” he says and points that the fact that there hasn’t been such a frost in Kavre for so many years may suggest in time another weather pattern change – of frost becoming a rarity.
Furthermore, the locals Dadagaon and Lamdihi have also noticed another curious event with their mango and jackfruit trees bearing fruits way earlier.
“It’s also unusual to see the peach blossoms already in full bloom at this time of the year,” says Nila Raj Regmi, Junior Technical Officer at Dadagaun. “This is almost a month and a half earlier than their usual blooming period.”
These unique events have left the farmers confused.
Experts, like Bed Mani Dahal, Assistant Professor at the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering of Kathmandu University, are also baffled by the unpredictable weather trends.
“If we analyze the literature from the past, we see that the average rainfall volume of Nepal hasn’t really changed too much but the timings have changed for sure,” says Dahal. “We don’t have downscaled rainfall data and trends for particular areas but reports of lesser and erratic rainfall is common in these (Kavre and Dhulikhel) areas.”
When asked about the consequences that early blossoms and fruit bearing could have on agricultural production, Dahal points out that it definitely means the yields wouldn’t be normal, and wouldn’t grow to its full capacity. Dahal, however, is more worried about soil erosion and the use of more pesticides and chemical fertilizers in the name of commercial farming, which he says is diminishing the soil’s fertility at an alarming rate.
As climate unpredictability surrounds the weather-dependent agriculture system, coupled with less availability of water and the lure of market demands vs. the agricultural costs increasing every year, the local farmers at Lamdihi who seem to have reached the crest of their agricultural progress now face an unknown adversary.
The best and the most effective adaptation measures are still unknown to many of these farmers, let alone practiced. But for today, they are still hopeful and able to celebrate – putting out of their mind for now the losses they’ve had to incur in the past and losses they might have to face in the future.
The writer finds inspiration in people´s stories.
ujjwala.maharjan@gmail.com
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