A smaller and relatively young district of little less than 600,000 acres, Lodhran was carved out of Multan in 1991. With Multan turning more of a cosmopolitan urban and commercial centre in the last three decades, its offspring preferred to stay as a parental extension: socially conservative, culturally traditional and predominantly agricultural.

With industry almost non-existent, agriculture is the way of life for the district dwellers — all its 600,000 acres are cultivated and divided into smallholdings for two reasons.

The massive inflow of settlers from other parts of the country during the last century was never expected to purchase bigger chunks of land. Big local, traditional and politically influential land-owning families saw their heritage divided during the same period and most of them have lost the feudal lustre. The district is thus more of a social relief in the otherwise feudal belt of South Punjab.

‘If the trend — vegetables, red chillies and tunnel farming — holds, Lodhran may become an example for many districts to follow’

This small landholding pattern made people more innovative than most in the 13 districts in the South. As cotton lost its economic sheen in the last decade, most of the vacated lands went to maize, rice and potato as a general provincial pattern. Initially, Lodhran took the same route. Once a strictly mono-crop district (out of a total of 599,459 acres, cotton claimed 492,000 acres in 2014-15), Lodhran started to spare fields for these crops and thus currently sows maize on 117,000 acres and rice on 58,000 acres as per the data of the Punjab Crop Reporting Service.

However, along this transition came the awareness for expanding to other smaller crops as well and the small landowners, under pressure to maximise income, went for all kinds of vegetables such as red chillies and onions in a big way. Sown over 30,000 acres, red chillies are bringing distinction to the district. After Kunri in Sindh, Lodhran is now an accepted centre of red chillies in most of the provincial markets. Its acreage has expanded close to 30,000 in the last five years from almost a negligible figure. Chillies’ technology was imported, indigenised and spread in the area to an extent that it became an emerging reason for fame.

Similar modernism was applied when it came to vegetables. Almost all kinds of vegetables are now produced in the area. Their acreage has also multiplied to over 30,000 acres if the local agriculture officers are to be believed. In addition to vegetables, tunnel farming has claimed more than 10,000 acres — a novelty in otherwise archaic agricultural settings of the South. Tunnel farming is capital-intensive — with each acre costing around Rs3.5 million for the set-up — and is a high-tech adventure. But it pays highly as well. One can imagine the kind of investment already made on the soil by the farmers and the process is still underway; each year more and more acres are coming under tunnels.

“If the trend — vegetables, red chillies and tunnel farming —holds, Lodhran may become an example for many districts to follow,” hopes Iftikhar Haider, a local pioneer in tunnel farming.

Explaining the success of minor crops and high-tech experiments, Azam Joya, a local farmer, says that Lodhran is luckily sandwiched between two big markets — Multan and Bahawalpur, both becoming urban centres and transitioning. Feeding both these markets gives Lodhran a unique vintage position and local small farmers are responding to those dietary demands.

In the same innovative spirit, farmers from Lodhran have improved their livestock better than many of their colleagues in the adjoining districts. As per Livestock Department Data, the district now owns 588,754 big animals (400,564 cows, 188,190 buffalos) and 475,580 smaller (400,685 goats and 74,895 sheeps) ones. This is in addition to 330,997 backyard poultry birds.

These dry stats, however, do not depict the entire picture. The area has immensely benefited from the two perennial, (and occasionally restarted with renewed vigour) initiatives: Feedlot Fattening and Save the Calf Schemes. Some of the districts ignored them completely, Lodhran, however, took them seriously.

Through these schemes, the Livestock Department, especially after 2015, started training farmers in raising big animals — vaccination, de-worming, nutrition, general cleanliness. According to the details of the schemes, once these animals or calves gained a certain weight as per departmental protocol, the department was paying Rs4,500 and Rs6,500 per animal.

The local farmers put the training to best use and there are now more than 20 big farms (even up to 500 animals), where feedlot fattening training is being used to fatten animals if the local livestock officials are to be believed. “Cholistani cow, which is a hard animal because it survives in harsh weather, has given an edge to the area and this advantage is being exploited to the hilt by the farmers. Similarly, the Naachi breed of goat is also vintage. However, what made the difference is how local farmers have preserved and nurtured those breeds, which now being put to commercial use,” says a local official of the Livestock Department.

“For feeding this massive population livestock population, the districts now devotes a little under 100,000 acres to fodder,” says a crop reporting service official. Fodder production includes all kinds of grass and silage.

Falling on the banks of the mostly dried River Sutlej and the tail-end of the provincial irrigation system, the district may be water-stressed but is certainly not water-poor. Two of its tehsils (Lodhran, Dunyapur) have sweet water zones under the soil and the third one (Karorpaka) with brackish water has perennial supplies. Lower Melsi Canal that mainly feeds the district is a perennial canal. Two other branches have six-month supplies.

“The water stress is however neutralised by soil fertility,” explains Naeem Qureshi, a farmer from neighbouring Bahawalpur but owning land in the district. “All these experiments with different crops and their patterns are being allowed, and made successful, by the soil fertility. The soil that used to predominantly produce cotton alone is now growing cucumber, chillies, okra, maize and rice with the same ease and yield. This is the kind of fertility that gives the district a clear edge over many other districts. And don’t forget the spread of mango orchards, which now perch over 25,000 acres and include as high tech initiatives as Ali Tareen Farms, which now exports mango all over the world,” he says.

“The Tareen farm benefited the district in more ways than one. It was the first one to introduce chillies technology when it was growing green chillies and sending it to Karachi. That technology later became available to local and smaller farmers and culminated in chillies success. It then graduated to mango and is leading the way to high-tech mango production now. It will raise the mango production bar and the entire area along with it,” he adds.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, July 5th, 2021