Managing soil with fertilizer
Man B.: The soil is..mixture of loam and sand. It is more sandy.
Bhaskar: Do you use fertilizer?
Man B. : Yes. Without fertilizer nothing grows well...
Bhaskar: Even Sabitri (local rice variety)..
Man B.: Even Sabitri. Nothing grows without fertilizer. We use fertilizer on everything even the vegetables...We used to get ranchers from the hills who would keep their cattle in our land and that provided lot of manure to the fields and used very little or no chemical fertilizer. Even the villagers used to keep big herds of cattle to plow the fields and helped farmers a lot. Now plowing the fields has been mechanized (use of tractors) so villagers only keep one or two pairs of animals to plow fields and the ranchers from the hills have stopped coming to the plains as they also don't keep big herds of cattle. Even the cattle ranchers from India don't come anymore as they don't keep large herds of cattle either.