Last week (at the time of writing this), I was called to the farm to help harvest pepper because there were so many. The farm needed extra hands to be able to harvest all the ripe fruits and also to help prevent the further spread of the disease that had infected the farm.
Disease? Yeah, and it was a very serious attack on the farm.
The pepper plants looked yellowish, with their leaves dropping off crazily, like a situation where they're malnourished and suffering from the absence of water. Meanwhile, they were being given fertilizer every now and then with constant water supply. Also, the seeds were burning with marks like fire burns on them. I felt too weak upon seeing them because the once very greenish farm I used to know had now turned yellowish, and the owner had noticed the infection on time and had already started treating them before I was called to the farm to help with the harvesting.
During the harvest, if there were 30 ripe fruits on a plant, 20 of them had already been corrupted by the disease, showing symptoms of burns on their bodies, and we were told not to put them in the bag, but rather pluck and throw them on the ground because those ones couldn’t be sold. The best method to use them is to dry them, grind them, and sell them as “grinded dried pepper.” I was so pained while plucking and dropping almost everything on the ground instead of putting them in the bag for direct sale.
We were three that plucked the whole farm that day, and we hurriedly did that because chemicals were to be sprayed on the plants immediately after we were done. According to him, for quicker recovery, the chemicals are to be sprayed every morning and evening, every day. That's a big task because it isn’t something that can be distributed through the irrigation pipes; instead, it must be sprayed in a way that touches the leaves of the plant, and that has to be manually done. At least, that’s the only available method on the farm.
Thanks for reading.
Photos are mine