Before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, 41-year-old Raza Mohammad of Rasoolpur, Ajmer used to teach at his own self-run school. As the pandemic started and the world went still, so did Raza’s income.
While looking for a means of survival, Raza realized he only had a 2 bigha land where he grows seasonal crops. However, that wasn’t enough to make a good living and in between all of this, he learned about pearl farming when he met Narendra Garwa of Kishangarh, Rajasthan who was doing pearl farming and decided to learn the popular farming business from him.
Success with Just One Day of Training
When Raza started learning about pearl farming, the lockdown took hold of the country, shortening his training to just one day. Using his knowledge from that one training session, he built a small pond in his own field in an area of 10/25 and started pearl farming by putting a tarpaulin in it.
He then collected all the materials needed for pearl farming such as an ammonia meter, pH meter, thermometer, antibiotics, mouth opener, and pearl nucleus while also preparing the feed for the oysters such as algae from dung, urea, and superphosphate.
In his pond, he had planted the seeds for 1000 oysters, which would eventually become designer pearls.
He inserted a nucleus in all the oysters and took care of their nutrition requirements and development. He says if everything goes right, an oyster can produce two pearls. He also mentioned that it takes 18 months for the pearl crop to develop and that he invested over 60-70 thousand rupees during the whole process. He is expecting to earn a profit of about 2.5 lakh in a few days from the crop yield.
Pearl Farming Requires Little Care but Lots of Waiting
Raza said that he only spent about an hour every day on pearl farming and assured that people can still do pearl farming if they have another job.
Talking about the requirements of pearl farming, he said that the pH and ammonia level of the water is to be checked only once a week. He advised that the pH level of the water should be kept between 7-8 and depending on the temperature of the place, the pearl might take more or less time to grow.
He also mentioned that the cost of maintenance in pearl farming is almost negligible but the more important requirement is to take care of the water level, the health of the oyster, the presence of algae, etc. It also requires the grower’s patience as you have to wait for a year to get the results.
Once the pearls are ready, they have to be sent to the laboratory. Depending on the quality of the pearl it could cost between Rs 200- Rs 1000 per pearl. Meanwhile, Narendra has been helping Raza throughout this journey. Raza has high hopes for the next round of crops and so he is preparing for pearl farming on a bigger scale now.
Speaking about the investment, Narendra said that purchasing 1,000 pearl seeds costs Rs 40,000 but brings in a profit of 3-4 times more. Here’s the contact number of Narendra from whom you can also get the training like Raza did- 9414519379.
