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Mr S. Bhaskarachari, a farmer in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, surveys his freshly planted field with satisfaction.
The saplings of the Totapuri variety of mango are neatly laid out in the rich, red soil, the tubes of the drip irrigation system snaking through the field.
Around 670 saplings have been planted on the one acre farmland at an investment of Rs 80,000.
Mr Bhaskarachari will need to invest around Rs 1.75 lakh over four years.
He has reason to be pleased.
yield period
The mango trees will start yielding from the third year and he can expect to make Rs 20,000 an acre and when the trees are in full bloom by the fifth year, up to Rs 1.2 lakh an acre.
Mr Bhaskarachari’s small farm of around four acres is one of the demo plots adopted by Project Unnati, a Coca-Cola and Jain Irrigation initiative to increase mango yield through ultra high density plantation methods, developed by Mr Jain. In traditional farming methods, Mr Anil Jain, Managing Director, Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd, says, only around 40 mango trees would have been planted and it would have taken at least 7-8 years to start yielding. As part of this Rs 11-crore project, 100 acres of mango farms, belonging to 62 farmers, have already been seeded.
Project Unnati intends to scale up the project to cover 300 acres of demo farms.
On Monday, a training bus was launched by the former Army Chief, General Ved Malik, who is the Chairman of an advisory council on environment and sustainability for Coca-Cola India.
Mr T. Krishnakumar, Chief Executive Officer, Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages, said that the Unnati mobile classroom will offer training to farmers across Andhra Pradesh and cover 50,000 farmers over five years.
The bus will take along demonstrators and agronomists on the UHDP techniques for mango cultivation, which also includes pruning and fertigation.
Coca-Cola’s fruit drink Maaza, which is among the largest juice brands in the country with Rs 1,500 crore in retail sales, is made from a blend of totapuri and alphonso mangoes.
Over 60 per cent of its mango pulp is sourced from the Chittoor region, a bulk of it from Jain’s processing plant here.
Coca-Cola sources over 50,000 tonnes of pulp a year for Maaza, which is made across 22 plants in the country and retailed in PET bottles, returnable glass bottles and cartons.
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