Bant: Udayanath Kar of Bant area has earned a name for himself as a successful farmer in Bhadrak district. However, he feels let down because of lack of government help and support.
He “could” have carried forward his farming activities had he got some financial support from the government. Kar was honoured at a Krushak Mela at Chandbali in 2017.
A resident of Silandi village in Basanti panchayat, Kar after completing B.Sc did Diploma in Mechanical Engineering but he did not like spending time looking for a job and this is when he thought of paddy farming.
After 16 years of paddy farming, he wanted to shift focus on fish farming. He is inspired by Bhaskar Chandra Mallick, a farmer of Nalanga area. Kar got a pond dug on his 20-acre farmland and started pisciculture.
Along with it, he also started dairy business and kept 20 cows. Later, he secured the entire land by raising a wall around. He also cultivated plantain and vegetables on the land. A year later, he built a farm for 15,000 fowl. Later, he got dug out three ponds measuring 5 acres each. Kar continued to expand his farming and started goat rearing with 100 goats.
“However, due to a natural disaster my entire farm was damaged. I had to incur a loss of Rs 5 to 6 lakh but no government help was made available to me,” he lamented. Later, to make up for the loss, he leased out the broiler farm to a company. Whatever the company pays towards rent is not enough to the earnings I used to make, he points out.
He has engaged seven to eight persons in the farm.
Kar manages to yield 15 to 20 quintals of fish from ponds every month while his dairy farm produces 2,000 litres of milk. Every two months, his poultry farm produces 13,000 chickens. Besides, he earns a lot from selling vegetables and other farm produce. “As the milk is sold to OMFED, I suffer huge losses,” he added.
In case of cattle deaths also I do not get compensation, even though animals are insured at the government-level, he added.