HE COM TH SU
By TOM Roche
ALI Osman Can is a 13-year-old with an infectious grin and a love of the countryside. Unlike many of his classmates from school in Lefkoşa, Ali Osman, lives on the farm and to say he feels at home there would be an understatement.
First, he gets to play with some big machines. Already, he can drive a tractor and soon he will graduate to the big beastthe combine harvester. He milks the cows, feeds the chickens and helps his father and grandfather in every way possible, learning the ropes for his future career.
Ali Osman combines traditional skills with new wave learning and now, through the magic of the internet- he has literally sown the seeds of a new crop for North Cyprus- sunflowers.
He is a bright boy, of that there is no doubt, but a little shy in front of strangers, so his aunt, Sıdıka Can, takes up the tale:
“My grandfather, who is also Ali Osman Can, his son- my brother Kemal and the grandsons, Ali Osman and Salih Can, who is six, all live on a big farm at Muratağa near Alinici.
“Mainly they keep cattle, about 100 cows, for milking. They love their animals and only feed them the best, green leaves and barley and their milk is of the highest quality. They sell it to the SüTek cooperative.
“Feeding the animals with barley is very expensive and we don’t get enough rain, the crop can fail, so we have to rely on imported feed. The family was discussing this problem so young Ali Osman researched it on the internet and discovered in Adana in Turkey, they feed cattle with sunflowers.
“He suggested it to his grandfather who went to Adana in January and bought some certified seeds. They grew 200 acres of sunflowers and we believe they are the first commercial crop of the flowers to be grown here.
“They grew beautifully in our fertile soil and they didn’t need any irrigation, only natural rainfall. After just two months they had a wonderful crop to harvest as sillage.”
The towering flowers made a spectacular sight in the afternoon sun, attracting such a host of bees that their buzzing drowned out the distant hum of traffic from the Lefkoşa-Iskele road. But by the time you read this, they will have been felled and turned into cattle feed.
Sıdıka, who is chairman of the Chamber of Food Engineers, added: “The sunflower is a valuable product but the agricultural politics in the TRNC is not working. The government supports farmers only for barley production but they cannot produce enough to feed our animals. .
“The TRNC pays 60 million TL for the milk to the farmers but the farmers pay 40 million to import feed for animals. The system is not working .We have to product our own local product!”
As the family’s beautiful Fresian cows munch happily on their new, fresh, aromatic dinner, Sıdıka’s nephew prepares to return to school.
He tells us of his love for the open-air life, how he enjoys fixing machinery and learning all there is to know about life in the fields.
Young Ali Osman, has also discovered that sunflowers can be made into oil, sold as a seed snack — and of course, are attractive simply as flowers. But for the time being at least, they have no equipment and there are no plans to do any more than grow them as sillage. In time, perhaps, they could become a new North Cyprus industry.
If they do, one young man is likely to be leading the way.