Vypeen: To deter birds from ravaging their crop, a group of farmers in Nayarambalam are cultivating pokkali rice under the cover of nets. A fine mesh has been draped over two acres of the Nedungad Kapp polders, which forms part of a 15-acre field on which cultivation is currently underway.

Since pokkali occupy only a negligible area across most panchayats in the region, those small plots have become vulnerable to bird damage. With large flocks destroying much of the harvest, enclosing the young plants under netting has become an essential experiment.This is not the first time that the paddy farmers have tried netting their crop 

For the past few years, farmers have sown paddy in the Kapp polders without interruption. “We’re using the Virippu variety this season,” explains Shyam Sunder, president of the Samajam. Because heavy machinery can’t navigate the raw mud, labourers have been hired to prepare the fields. A shortage of genuine pokkali seed has forced many to purchase alternative varieties at ₹100 per kilogram.

Once the seedlings flourish to the right height, they will be manually uprooted and transplanted across the entire field. Although the costs of netting and manual labour limit the profitability of standalone pokkali farming, growers believe that integrating paddy with fish in a joint-farming model could draw more young people back to the  field.