The morning sun had not yet spread its full heat. Stepping into an orchard in Nayanpur village of Bhaluka in Mymensingh, one’s eye is caught by rows of lotkon trees bent under the weight of fruit. Holding clusters of yellowish ripe fruit, Rokon Uddin sometimes bargains with wholesalers and sometimes shows improved-variety grafts to farmers who have come from far away.
A few years ago, Hafez Rokon Uddin was known as a mosque imam. Today he is known as a successful lotkon farmer and a developer of improved-variety lotkon saplings. One variety developed in his orchard is now known locally as “Nayanpuri lotkon.”
Rokon Uddin was spoken to last Monday at Nayanpur village in the upazila’s Mallikbari union. As he showed his orchard, he told the story of how he became a farmer. For a living, he said, he had long served as an imam at various mosques and madrasas, but planting trees was his passion in the intervals of his religious duties, and whenever he got the chance — at a mosque, a madrasa or his home yard — he would plant fruit trees. That hobby eventually brought him to commercial fruit farming. In 2018, he said, he set out by buying 30 lotkon saplings from Muktagacha upazila. But he suffered a big setback at the start: many of the trees turned out to be male, so he did not get the expected yield. He then learned grafting techniques himself, selected good yielding trees and built the orchard anew. Alongside an old one-bigha plot, he began commercial lotkon farming on three new bighas with about 200 trees, and success began to come from 2023.
Rokon Uddin said he had worked with 8 to 10 varieties over eight years, and after long trial and error, two seemed the best. One of these bears large, very sweet fruit that is also in high demand in the market. There is a story behind the naming of this improved variety too. Shaykh Siraj, the presenter of the agriculture-based television programme “Hridoye Mati o Manush,” visited his orchard this year and suggested naming the variety “Nayanpuri lotkon” after the village, and it has since been known locally by that name.
Rokon Uddin said he now grows lotkon in two orchards on four bighas of land. Alongside farming himself, he also produces and sells saplings by grafting. A one-year graft sells for Tk 100, and a graft of one and a half to two years for Tk 200 to Tk 250, with his sapling sales worth Tk 5 to 8 lakh a year. Every year, farmers and entrepreneurs come to his orchard from various districts to collect saplings. If the saplings are not of good variety, farmers will suffer losses, he said, so he makes saplings only from tested trees, wanting others to succeed with them too.
The orchard’s lotkon is currently selling at Tk 3,500 a maund. At the start of the season he has already sold about Tk 70,000 to Tk 80,000 worth of fruit and hopes sales will rise further. Alongside his own orchard, he also buys the fruit of several nearby orchards wholesale and markets it. Md Enamul Haque, a farmer from Gaffargaon upazila who came to buy saplings, said: “I had seen his orchard on Facebook. I liked the fruit very much after tasting it, so I bought 32 grafted saplings. If I succeed, I too will set up a commercial lotkon orchard.”
Local farmer Abdus Salam said Rokon Uddin’s lotkon fruit was large, good-looking and sweet, which had built people’s trust in his saplings, so many came here to take saplings and buy fruit. Bhaluka Upazila Agriculture Officer Nusrat Zaman said Rokon Uddin’s journey, which began as a hobby, was no longer just a story of his personal success. It showed, she said, that with proper planning, patience and innovative thinking, even the fallow land of rural Bengal could change a person’s life.
Noting that lotkon was being grown on about 5 hectares of land in the upazila, agriculture officer Nusrat Zaman said that because entrepreneurs like Rokon Uddin were producing good-quality saplings, new orchards were springing up, and that if this trend continued, there was potential to export Bhaluka’s lotkon in future.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report