Wheat straw prices fall due to lack of demand, farmers worried

With the prices of wheat straw crashing this season owing to decrease in the population of milch cattle and the industry shifting to paddy straw instead of wheat hay as fuel, the wheat growers are worried as the crop residue has no demand.

With the prices of wheat straw falling to Rs 250 per quintal, the traders are not buying crop residue as they have to spend Rs 1,300 per hectare for manufacturing ‘toori’. Harvir Singh Laddi, a farmer from Cheema Khurd, said, “A trolley has four to five quintals of toori. With the price as low as now, the traders would not even recover their investments.”

Laddi said that he had harvested the crop five days ago, but till date not even a single person has approached him for purchase of crop residue. Another farmer Mandeep Singh from the same village said, “People do not own animals which are required to be fed on ‘toori’. As such there is no demand for it.”

He said that earlier, traders from Rajasthan and elsewhere used to roam around in the villages but this season, no one has arrived.

The farmers are worried that with no one buying their crop residue, they would have no option but to clear their fields for the next crop by burning it. “If the farmers burn the crop residue, they would have to face FIRs and penalty. But nobody is concerned about the problems being faced by us,” said another farmer.