VADODARA: This news is sheer nectar for the die-hard mango fans who cannot get enough of the mango season every year. Thank mango farmer near Vadodara city, Ajit Thakor, who has answered your prayers and made the king of fruits truly season-less and round-the-year delight for Barodians.
So much so, that Banyan City may soon acquire a new moniker as the new Mango City after turning into a huge mango bowl of the state in a matter of few years.
New species of mangoes developed by Thakor are yielding fruits throughout the year. Even as this year’s season is over in the country, Thakor’s farm still has hundreds of mango trees bearing tonnes of lush green mangoes hanging at a height as low as three feet.
Originally a cotton and tur dal farmer in Kajapur village near Por, Thakor switched to horticulture in 2000 as the other crops were not yielding much profit. Two decades down the line, Thakor today makes over Rs 50 lakh annually from his mango orchard where he has planted thousands of trees.
“I wanted to do something so that people can have mangoes throughout the year. People eagerly wait for April when the season begins and by June markets run out of stock and still people like to have more, so I developed this species. In fact, when NRIs come during December and January, they too can relish these mangoes,” Thakor told TOI.
The farmer learnt grafting from a man living in Tarsali area of Vadodara and since then, he has been experimenting by cross-grafting of different species of mangoes. Thakor has travelled extensively in Uttar Pradesh’s Malihabad, which is popular in northern India for its mangoes, and have brought saplings from there for grafting.
“I worked on five species of which two species – Neelphonso and Rasulabad – are yielding high quality fruits,” he said.
Neelphonso was originally developed by Navsari Agricultural University through cross-grafting of Neelam and Alphonso to develop it as an off-season specie. While the original Neelphonso is available for harvest in July and August, the one growing at Thakor’s farm can be harvested thrice a year. Reason? Thakor further cross-grafted it with other species.
Thakor named Rasulabad after the village in Vadodara district from where he got the first sapling of the mango for cross-grafting of this specie.
Trained under Thakor, many farmers in the village too, have seen exponential growth in their incomes in the past few years. “There was little or no income from cotton and tur dal farming, so Ajitbhai told me to learn to graft. Initially, I grafted 400 trees but seeing the growth in earnings, I expanded and today there is tremendous growth in our family income,” said Ramesh Thakor, another farmer from Kajapur. This year Ramesh is planning to completely switch to horticulture.
