Mennonites from the Nuevo Progreso neighborhood in Campeche, will now plant sorghum due to losses from the low watermelon crop.
“The Campeche Mennonite colony of Nuevo Progreso will only harvest 1,000 hectares of watermelon from the autumn-winter cycle, a smaller amount compared to previous years, when they planted between 2,000 and 2,500 hectares,” reported the Mennonite leader Abraham Tiessen.
He indicated that the farmers now bet on sorghum and not on watermelon, therefore, some will harvest this fruit in the first week of February, but they will only get half of last year’s production.
The previous year, part of the Mennonite fields planted more hectares of watermelon. Most of it was exported but also marketed in local, state, and national markets, but this cycle changed the routine due to losses in the soybean harvest.
In this sense, the Mennonite leader explained that the producers chose to plant sorghum, which yields more and is abundant in these lands.
In addition, he stated that each year they sow nine thousand hectares of soybeans and three thousand of corn throughout the Mennonite colony of Nuevo Progreso, to make a total of 12 thousand hectares of crops, but to this is added the land they rent, for which reason In the end, all the soybean production is marketed and sent to the hydrogenation plants in Mérida, Yucatán.
However, in 2022 more than 40 percent of the crop was lost due to the drought and that is why they are trying to recover with sorghum, and for this reason this year they left watermelon aside to occupy more land for the product.
However, the little cultivation of watermelon would increase its price in the markets, since other Mennonite colonies are in the same conditions, although the governor of the Nuevo Progreso colony is confident that the low production of a thousand hectares will be monopolized by Yucatán .
“At the moment we hope to harvest sorghum with a yield of three to four tons per hectare and sell it for 5,500 pesos per ton,” Abraham Tiessen concluded.
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