Distraught farmers selling off their cattle at Suttur Fair

Cattle fair is a regular feature at the Suttur Jatra held every year, where farmers bring in their excess cattle to the fair to sell them to prospective buyers. But this year the scene was a little different. More number of farmers had brought their cattle to the fair to sale them off as they cannot afford to look after them. Already reeling under severe drought, farmers are finding it difficult to provide feed for their live stocks.

Farmer Prabhuswamy says: “When our livelihood is at stake, how can we look after the livestocks. The lands have dried-up, providing fodder, water for livestock is another challenging task. Hence, we decided to sell off the two pairs of cattle instead of seeing them suffering from hunger in our backyards due to hunger and thirst.”

“Many of them are unaware of the problems faced by farmers and ground reality. Rising input costs of seeds and fetilisers, severe drought, farm labour shortage, less yield and other problems has pushed our life into misery,” says another farmer Mahadevanna.

While, the presence of large number of cattle at the fair, all brought for sale, raised the eyebrows of many. But there were only countable number of buyers. Farmers were telling that following drought the number of buyers has come down, and sellers has increased.

Cattle Fair President YP Mahadevappa said that more than 450 pairs of cattle were brought for sale, which was just about 230 last year. there is good response for fair this year, compare to last year.

Agricultural Student from Bangalore Mithuna opined that “if something is not done to check this new trend, the consequences in the coming years will be more severe as most farmers would have given up farming by then and gone to other professions.” Farmers from Chamarajanagar, Mysore, Mandya had taken part in the fair. Rs 3.30 lakh cattle pair were cynosure of ally eyes at the fair.