Sonepat records only 8 farm fire incidents

ROHTAK : Haryana’s Sonepat district, where paddy (rice) is grown across 2.2 lakh acres, has seen only eight cases of stubble burning this year, as compared to 44 in 2018, district agriculture officers said.

Sonepat’s deputy director agriculture Anil Sherawat said there has been no stubble burning in 360 of the 367 villages.

“Paddy is the main crop in the district and we have been educating farmers on adopting manual harvesting of paddy as well as wheat. The farmers are manually harvesting the stubble and selling it to farmers in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh as animal fodder,” he added.

Balwan Dahiya, a farmer from Barona village said that he shifted to manually harvesting the crop (from mechanical harvesting) three years ago and has stopped the practice of burning paddy straw.

“By adopting manual method, each farmer is earning between ₹3,500 and ₹5,000 per acre by selling paddy straw. Earlier, we used to burn crop residue in order to prepare the fields for wheat cultivation,” he added.

Deepak Malik, a farmer of Bhainswal Kalan village, said he made ₹55,000 from Uttar Pradesh-based farmers by selling fodder this year.

“I sowed paddy on 17 acres of land and harvested it by the manual method. I will give the dry fodder from 11 acres to farmers in UP and kept the remaining for our cattle. The farmers from UP buy stubble as fodder as they sow sugarcane on their farm land.”

Some farmers, Malik added, were selling the stubble to the paper industry or for ethanol production in UP.

There has been a 35% dip in stubble burning incidents in the state due to better monitoring and willingness of farmers to adopt manual harvesting.