With hopes of Cauvery water drying up and northeast monsoon playing truant, samba crops in around 79,000 acres in the district are in various stages of wilting, official sources said. The samba and thalady crops were cultivated in only 2,60,000 acres in the district — a marked difference from the usual crop coverage of 3,30,000 acres — due to the non-release of Cauvery water from Karnataka as per the final award of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT). The Mettur dam was opened only on September 20, 100 days behind its June 12 schedule. Hence the farmers did not show interest in raising the samba crops, which led to a fall in the  area under crop coverage. Besides the precarious storage level, the northeast monsoon also failed them. Instead of the normal rainfall of 535 mm during the North East monsoon season, which commences on October 1, the district received only 183 mm rainfall till December 25. In effect, the district received only 34 per cent of the normal rainfall during this monsoon, while the deficit was a whopping 66 per cent. All these factors had a bearing on the standing samba crop, which was dependent only on canal water and monsoon bounty. The farmers with no sources of ground water irrigation are struggling to save the crop by spraying potassium chloride solution (KCl), which would deter evapotranspiration of moisture from the crop. The Tamil Nadu Agriculture University is also expected to supply Pink-Pigmented Facultative Methylobacterium (PPFM), which could be sprayed on the stressed crops to mitigate the drought, the officials said. “So far, around 1,500 acres of the 79,000 acres have been covered with the spraying of these solutions,”  an official of the Agriculture Department said. Despite these efforts, the farmers and officials voiced concerns that the yield would go down drastically. Senior Agro Technologists Forum’s Thanjavur chapter president P Kalaivanan said in the present condition, the samba crop cultivated using ground water from borewells in the Cauvery and Grand Anaicut irrigated area could survive. In Vennaru irrigated area, except Ammapettai, Valangaiman and Needamangalam blocks, even the samba crop raised using ground water are in a stressed condition. Source - http://www.newindianexpress.com