Indian Farmers Are Producing Apples Where They Never Grew Before
It’s all thanks to the ingenuity of a small grower.
In April 2018, during a holiday trip to Kulu, a city in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, Abhijit Dhumal came across a tree unlike any he had seen before.
“The tree was full of flowers and had hardly any leaves,” says Dhumal, a sugarcane farmer from the western state of Maharashtra.
Intrigued, he made enquiries and found that it was an apple tree that came from a nursery in that state. He bought 255 apple saplings from the nursery and planted them in December 2018 in his farm in Mukhai village, a place with a hot and dry climate. This June, he had a bounty of apples from the trees that grew from the seedlings. He plans to go commercial next year, when he expects a bigger harvest.
Farmers in this part of India once never dreamed of growing apples. They’re now cultivating the fruit, thanks to the ingenuity of a small Indian farmer called Hariman Sharma.
In 1998, Sharma was surprised to find an apple sapling growing in his backyard where he had thrown some seeds of an apple he had eaten. Apples normally don’t grow in his district of Bilaspur, which is a mere 678 meters (around 2,200 feet) above sea level.
In India, apples were, until recently, cultivated only in the upper terrains of the states of Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh, at an altitude of 1,600-2,500 meters (5,200-8,200 feet) above sea level. These are areas with temperate climates.
Curious, he nurtured the plant until it bore fruit three years later. The apples were small in size, so he grafted a young shoot on a plum tree that was easily available in the area. The grafting was successful, and the trees bore big, red juicy apples.
After several experiments, he settled on the golden delicious variety of apple for grafting in 2004, and he developed a unique self-pollinating apple tree that grows in low altitudes.
“The tree flowers in Feb and the fruits are ready for harvest in June and don’t require chilling,” he says. Typically, apples from Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh require chilling, and they are harvested in late August. Sharma thought that this off-season, no-chilling variety could be beneficial for small independent farmers and tried to encourage them to buy the saplings with little success.
In 2013, the National Innovation Foundation (NIF)—a government agency that looks to foster innovation—heard about Sharma’s apple variety and conducted field trials. The NIF planted around 10,000 saplings on 1,000 individual farmers’ fields and 25 organizations in 29 states from 2015 to 2017. The trials proved successful, and the apple cultivar was named HRMN- 99 after its innovator, Hariman Sharma.
“Sharma selected the best compatible rootstock and scion for long-term sustainability of apple production. Increase in average global temperature might also have moved the plant species to acclimatize to new areas with low altitudes and hot climates,” says Hardev Choudhary, a senior scientist at NIF.
The NIF’s work helped Sharma reach hundreds of farmers. He says he now sells between 200,000 and 300,000 saplings each planting season.
Unable to sustain their families on rice and vegetable farming, farmers in Shingkap village in the northeastern state of Manipur are some of his biggest customers. One of these farmers, Blessing Jajo, started researching ways to improve his income, and along with his brother, Yuireichan Jajo, met a research co-ordinator from the NIF who told them about HRMN-99.
They convinced 40 farmers from the village to come together to grow the HFMN-99. In 2019, they bought and planted 4,200 saplings. The NIF co-ordinator trained them to cultivate these apples, teaching them about methods for pruning, mulching, grafting and disease prevention.
Several trees bore apples at the end of the first year, a sign of success according to Yuireichan Jajo. “Many people thought the apple trees will not grow, so they didn’t join initially,” he says. “But this year, another 100 farmers joined us. We now have 13,000 saplings growing on 420 acres of land.”
This large-scale cultivation of HRMN-99 has prompted several farmers across the country from the dusty plains of the northern state of Rajasthan to the hot plateau of Telangana in southern India to take up apple farming.
In February, the Indian government gave Sharma, now 66 years old, breeding and selling rights for HRMN 99 with an initial protection period of nine years.
“The success story of this apple variety gives a new horizon for research on other temperate fruit crops to mitigate the adverse situations that arise due to global warming,“ says Choudhary.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].Indian Farmers Are Producing Apples Where They Never Grew Before
by Deepa Padmanaban, Modern Farmer
August 16, 2021
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
“The apples were small in size, so he grafted a young shoot on a plum tree that was easily available in the area. The grafting was successful, and the trees bore big, red juicy apples.”
I question this, how does one graft an apple shoot to a plum tree? They are not genetically close enough to graft successfully. Malus and Prunus are different genera of plants.
Neat! A win-win for everyone. Producers gain income, and the consumer gets more variety in the diet. Hope these apple trees go all over India.
I am keen to introduce Genuine and time tested Apple seedlings to Karnataks State in India to prevent unsuitable varieties that unaouthorisedly enter with out performing data
these look like pawpaws. I believe they are called custard apple in India.
Amazing.
How two distant genera plants be grafted. Scientists should come forward to explain and confirm.
these look like pawpaws. I believe they are called custard apple in India.https://kinhnghiemxoso.com/lo-cam-la-gi-cach-choi-lo-cam-nhu-the-nao-de-trung-lai-cao/