Site description survey of outreach research site Hemja VDC of Kaski district represent low hills in western Nepal

A site description survey was carried out from September 29 to 1st October 2000 at the outreach research site of the Agricultural Research Station, Lumle at Hemja, VDC in Kaski district. The site represents low hill environments. The Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) technique was used to establish benchmark information on bio-physical, socio-economic, institutional and farming constraints, farmers' needs and researchable problems to carryout agricultural research on need based representative problems. Almost 67 percent of annual rainfall occurred from June to October. Maximum hailstone occurred in April (30 percent) and March (30 percent). The total population of the site was 7622 with dominace of Brahman household of about 600 (44 percent) followed by occupational castes household 100 (7.3 percent). Most of the households belonged to food sufficient group (41.7 percent) followed by food surplus group (33.3) and food deficit group (25 percent). Potato, maize, millet and rice are commonly consumed as staple foods. Cereals from on-farm and service and pension were the main source of off farm income. Women were involved in all the farming activities except ploughing the land of 1358 ha of cultivated land, bari land occupied about 648 ha with an average holding of 0.7 ha. Black soil is dominant in the village. The cropping pattern in khet land is rice-wheat-maize, rice-wheat-fallow, rice-fallow-potato, rice-mustard-wheat and rice-vegetable-fallow. Broad leaf mustard, radish, cauliflower and cabbage are the major winter vegetables and potato is the most commonly produced crop. Buffalo, cattle, bullock, sheep, goat and poultry are the most important livestock followed by ducks. Rice straw, maize stalk, maize husk, millet straw wheat straw fodder and thatched grasses were the principal livestock feed besides concentrated feed, fed to the lactating buffaloes. Badhahar was the most commonly preferred fodder. The general problem of the site was the lack of irrigation, hailsone, attack of red ant in root crops as well as late blight of potato, tomato and white grub in maize, millet and rice, snail attack, labour scarcity in the time of cultivation, blast in rice, animal disease (infertility problem in buffalo and cattle) and scarcity of fodder and forage in summer are common problem of farmers. Farmers are demanding high yielding varieties of potato, maize, rice and millet and also the saplings of fodder tree and fruit crops. Farmers were mostly cultivating MS-42 and Kufriyoti for potato, Manakamana, Arun and Khumal yellow for maize, Gurdi and Jhethobudo for rice, RR-21 for wheat and local millet.