Photos Of Cherry Harvesting In Kashmir: Enjoy Fresh & Ripe Season Of Cherries
Ankita Chetana|May 31, 2020
Cherry harvesting in Kashmir seems to be catchy to everyone with every fresh red and ripe piece of this fruit. See the photos!
It's time to welcome the season of cherry - the fruit rich in vitamin C, carbohydrate, and fibers. But due to the coronavirus pandemic, cherry harvesting in Kashmir is not quite as bumper as every year. This crop even sees an unfavorable result and finds it hard to enter the market as well.
The intemperate weather partly affected the apple crop of this year. The farmers have been expecting to collect another source of income from cherry harvesting but the supply and logistics chain is unlikely to help them out. Check out some photos of the harvesting season in Kashmir below.
On May 26th, in Lar town, Jammu & Kashmir, farmers gather at a cherry orchard to sort and pack fresh fruits. Plenty of cherries here are ripe and ready to harvest but farmworkers still keep worrying about losses of this crop as the lockdown restrictions make production and export harder.An old farmer picks cherries up from the Kashmir valley. In 2020, there have been about 12,000 metric tons of cherry produced, which shows an increase of 300 metric tons compared to 2019's crop. Deputy Director of Horticulture Planning and Marketing Manzoor Ahmad Mir said that nearly a quarter of this harvesting is going to be exported.They use buckets to collect cherries and then sort into the packaging. Markets and several stores remain shut down amidst the coronavirus lockdown so cherry consumption is a big problem to all the farmers in the Valley.Cherries in Kashmir include 4 types: Awwal Number, Double, Makhmali, and Mishri. Normally, the two latter types are produced to export to other states of India. Earlier this year, farmers had been living harsh with the apple crop. Thus, all of them put a high expectation into the cherry harvesting to cover the lost source of income.A farmer from Baramulla named Mudasir Ahmad Lone shared: "Fruit is ready but there are no cardboard boxes in the market to pack the fruit. Industries are closed so there is scarcity of boxes."Farmworkers request free transportation of fruit trucks till Amritsar. The railways have been back to work to help farmers and agreed to transport the products from June 1st.