Odisha, India: A New Hub for Pumpkin Farming
ODISHA, INDIA – Pumpkin fields as far as the eye can see. That’s what you’ll find in Karanjia block—a largely tribal area in the Mayurbhanj district, located in eastern Odisha state.
In the last growing season, farmers using improved agronomic techniques and disease-resistant seeds covered nearly 2,000 acres of Karanjia and neighboring Keonjhar district in pumpkin vines. This high-nutrition vegetable is bringing farmers an average net profit of US$830 to US$870 per acre, spurring tremendous economic growth.
Just a few years ago, the story was very different. Although the sandy loam soil and climate in this area is suitable for pumpkin cultivation, smallholder farmers using traditional growing methods and local pumpkin varieties struggled with low yields and poor marketability. The market demand is for larger pumpkins, and local varieties’ susceptibility to viral diseases resulted in high pesticide use and poor fruit quality.
The situation started to change in 2021, when East-West Seed Knowledge Transfer Foundation (EWS-KT) began to work with smallholder farmers in Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar. EWS-KT set up vegetable production demonstration plots with local farmers and held training sessions on improved cultivation techniques. Raised beds, proper spacing, appropriate fertilization, and integrated pest management (IPM) methods led to higher and better-quality yields for farmers. Still, the market challenges with local pumpkin varieties remained.
In 2022, EWS-KT established the Center of Excellence, a vegetable production learning hub in Keonjhar where farmers are exposed to sustainable farming practices to increase productivity and profitability. At the Center of Excellence, and in EWS-KT farmers’ pumpkin demonstration plots, farmers saw larger pumpkins with a uniform shape. They soon realized that this pumpkin variety, combined with the improved agronomic techniques they had learned, could finally enable them to meet market demand.
Growing these pumpkins, which have good disease resistance, also meant that farmers could rely on newly learned pest management techniques like pheromone traps, rather than spraying pesticides. The significant reduction in the use of pesticides—with most farmers using none at all on their pumpkin fields—saves farmers considerable time and money, as well as benefiting the environment and consumers.
Since most of the pumpkins produced in this area are sold to traders and shipped to Kolkata, West Bengal (about four hours away), farmers also saw market advantages in the new variety’s long shelf life, ability to tolerate long-distance transport, and flat top and bottom, which make it easier to stack the pumpkins for travel.
Today, farmers in Karanjia and beyond have embraced high-quality seeds and better farming methods—and have scaled up pumpkin production like never before, leasing more and more land for pumpkin cultivation. At harvest time, hundreds of trucks come from West Bengal to collect growers’ high-quality pumpkins for this previously untapped market, and farmers have doubled or tripled their profits.
EWS-KT’s intervention has not only transformed the pumpkin marketplace but has created a new market for high-quality inputs, including pumpkin seeds, as farmers have switched from low-yielding traditional pumpkin varieties to high-yielding varieties. This is an exciting expansion opportunity for farmers, agro-input dealers, and others in the vegetable value chain.
EWS-KT Executive Director Stuart Morris recently visited the pumpkin fields of east Odisha. “Where there’s market and land available, the highly nutritious pumpkin is a wonder crop,” he said. Reflecting on EWS-KT’s Pumpkins in Africa project, he added, “East-West Seed founder and World Food Prize laureate Simon Groot’s vision for 1 million acres of pumpkin in Africa can take a lot of inspiration from these simple but highly profitable fields in Odisha, India.”
Pumpkin: Huge Potential for Smallholder Farmers
Pumpkins are relatively easy and inexpensive to grow, and they have excellent nutritional value and a long shelf life. Discover the many factors that make pumpkin an attractive crop for smallholder farmers.
