Staff from the International Potato Center travelled to Jodhpur, India, as part of a project to find new areas of India in which to pilot potato programs. Jodhpur's arid landscape, the water table, and the warm days that fed into cool evenings were reminiscent of Gujarat - India’s most productive potato growing state, except that in Jodhpur and Jaisalmer no potatoes were grown.
The land was fertile and free of soil borne diseases, favorable conditions for potato cultivation. Despite the obvious advantages potato farming was non-existent on this stretch of land.
Sushma Arya, agronomist at the International Potato Center (CIP), said “The summer is harsh and the soil sandy and difficult to travel on.”
“Once you get down to the field you are completely desiccated because it is so warm and dry.”
Local enthusiasm for the project and the potential for real impact, however, made the CIP team decide to not only take the lead on the project but to increase its scope to include 16 farmers in Jodhpur and another 14 in a similar dryland area in Jaisalmer.
Preliminary evaluation trials showed good yields with solid performance by some of CIP clones adapted for heat tolerance and water scarcity.
The yields in the project’s first harvest were far more than anyone had imagined. Whereas the average across India was 23 tons of potatoes per hectare with West Bengal topping in at 29 tons per hectare, one of the first-time potato farmers in Jaisalmer tipped the scales with an encouraging 32 tons of potato per hectare.
CIP hopes to continue to ride that wave by exploring other opportunities for potato farmers in the coming seasons. To help create new prospects for women, CIP is looking at potato processing as a business opportunity where women can work from home preparing chips and powder for sale at the local market.
Regular meetings with the local government have been conducted to help build momentum to secure support and funding for infrastructure building and investing in things like sprinkler irrigation at a larger scale.
In less than a year the unimaginable has happened, “In this isolated area people are now talking about potatoes,” Sushma says.
A farmer from Jodhpur recently told her that when his truck loaded down with potatoes reached the wholesale market shopkeepers preferred his potatoes over the ones brought in from Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh saying that the shining potatoes produced in the sand dunes of Rajasthan were superior.
