Planting cotton seeds begun on banks of river al-Balikh

 HEVIDAR HARANI –AHMED KAMYAN / GIRESIPI

The importance of cotton cultivation lied in being a source of income and season for farmers and provides employment opportunities for thousands of people in agricultural areas.

Cotton farmers begin to plant seeds on the fields at the beginning of the second half of April each year, for suitable climatic conditions, where the weather is suitable for planting with high temperatures and cold and frosts that may adversely affect the growth of this plant.

The cultivation of the cotton season provides employment opportunities for thousands of workers, and is an important source of income for farmers, despite the high costs of planting it. The cost of one acre is about 25,000 SYP.

It is cultivated in several stages, the most important of which is the process of sowing seeds in the soil, called "normalization" followed by watering. Seeds see light after 10-15 days of watering.

This is followed removing harmful plants, and treatment with pesticides and fertilizers necessary to harvest the crop in September, where the plant is about five months.

As for work in the cotton fields, women play a prominent role in this season, which is assigned to about 90% of the work during the cotton season from the beginning of seed cultivation until harvest, and the work of men here is limited to irrigation and crop control with pesticides and fertilizers.

Hawar news agency (ANHA) interviewed with worker Raham al-Ahmad, she pointed out that the cotton growing season is an important source of income for them.

Riham added "Every worker in this field earns around 1000 Syrian Pounds a day. Our work starts from the early hours of the morning. We work every day for about 6 hours.”

The owner of a workshop in cotton from al-Hisha town Ali Yassin said that the cotton season is witnessing the peak of movement and work after the recession during the winter.

In the same context, the farmer Hussein Mohammed stressed that the cotton season consumes about 10 times irrigation. "The need for water varies from one land to the other. We suffer from several difficulties for irrigation, while the irrigation pump stopped feeding us with irrigation water. By engines, which increases the cost of the crop."

On the other hand, the Turkish state is trying to allocate the bulk of the water of the Balikh River to irrigate agricultural lands on the Turkish side and to keep the land on the banks of the river without watering, by building projects on the river to reserve its water.

Our agency (ANHA) published news in this regard a while ago cutting the waters of the River Belikh causes fears of damage to the agricultural season.

(T/S)

ANHA