Rice farming cooperatives of Vanua Levu have shown their appreciation to the Fijian Government through the Ministry of Agriculture for its assistance in securing three brand new rice harvesters for three cooperatives in the North.

The three rice farmers’ cooperatives namely Matasawalevu Land Purchase Cooperative, Naibulu Nacula Stage 1 Cooperative and Muanidevo Stage 3 Rice Farmers Cooperative in Dreketi, Macuata received their rice harvesters from the Ministry of Agriculture a fortnight ago.

Matasawalevu Land Purchase Cooperative President Dharam Raj expressed his heartfelt thanks to Government for the timely assistance because they had faced a lot of difficulties harvesting their members’ rice fields.

Mr Raj said they required a lot of labour as well to harvest the rice and with the rice harvester, their labour issues would automatically be resolved; “I want to thank the Government of the day because we face a lot of issues when it is harvesting time, we want our rice harvested on time but we have to wait for the machine to arrive or we have to look for some labour to come help harvest our rice, with the rice harvester here now, all of that is now over for our cooperative here at Matasawalevu.”

Matasawalevu Land Purchase Cooperative Secretary Dharmendra Naresh also elaborated that members of their cooperative employed sickles to harvest their rice which was a time-consuming exercise.

“We are happy because this harvester will benefit the fifty farmers of our cooperative who all helped to pay for our contribution to the Government before we harvested manually and it will take us three to four weeks, a month to harvest all our rice but with this harvester, that can all be done in two to three days,” said Mr Naresh.

Meanwhile, Naibulu Nacula Stage 1 Cooperative President Sudesh Kumar echoed similar sentiments upon receiving their rice harvester from the Minister for Agriculture Hon. Dr Mahendra Reddy.

“I am very happy because we are from the biggest rice-growing area in Fiji and this is the first-ever time we’ve paid our money and bought this big rice harvester where we paid $21,000 and I am very happy and I want to thank the Ministry of Agriculture for what they’ve done for us,” said Mr Sudesh.

“Before, we used to have a lot of headaches on how our rice would be harvested, but after we received this, I can tell that a lot of tension has been relieved from us and the rice harvester that we’ve received today is bigger than the one we used to use before and I just want to say thank you very much to the Ministry of Agriculture, on behalf of our 43 farmers who are part of the cooperative who contributed to the purchase of the rice harvester, we say thank you very much,” said an elated Sudesh.

Coincidently, Muanidevo Stage 3 Rice Farmers Cooperative President Ravendra Autar said they no longer needed to rely on the Ministry of Agriculture’s harvester to harvest their rice, sharing that their new harvester was a welcome addition to their farming group.

“We had to wait on the availability of the Agriculture harvester to be available in our area before our rice could be harvested and this is a big area, sometimes the harvesting time is not met by Agriculture harvesters, but now there is no longer a long waiting period for my farmers when harvesting time for rice comes.

“We are very happy to see this harvester here for us rice farmers because for a very long time, we only planted the rice but now we own a rice harvester for ourselves, we are just glad that the Agriculture Ministry stepped up to help because rice is unlike other crops when it’s time to harvest, it must be harvested and now we can do that so I would like to say thank you to the Minister and the Ministry for all that you have done for us,” said Mr Autar.

Meanwhile, Minister Reddy acknowledged the farmers for their efforts in raising rice production this year highlighting that their input was paying dividends for the Fijian economy as it had positively contributed to our increase in rice self-sufficiency rate while simultaneously reducing our rice import bill.

Each cooperative paid their one-third contribution of approximately $20,000 to $21,000 while the Ministry of Agriculture paid the remaining balance of the total cost of each of the three mechanical rice harvesters.