Shopian, Aug 16: Thousands of apple farmers in south Kashmir’s Shopian district are counting fresh losses after back-to-back hailstorms damaged orchards across dozens of villages, renewing demands for a comprehensive crop insurance scheme to protect growers from increasingly frequent weather shocks.
The latest hailstorm on August 14 battered villages including Kapran, Mandujan, Feripora, Pudsoo and Batgund, damaging apples that were approaching harvest.
Mohammad Irfan, an affected farmer, said marble-sized hailstones pounded his orchard, leaving bruises on the fruit and making much of the crop difficult to sell at premium prices.
He said his orchard suffered nearly 100% damage.
“Without any protection, we are exposed to mounting losses,” Irfan said.
The repeated weather events have heightened concerns among growers, many of whom say they have limited options for recovering losses from damaged crops. Political leaders and farmers’ groups have renewed their calls for the introduction of a crop insurance scheme in Jammu and Kashmir.
Zahoor Ahmad Rather, president of the J&K Apple Farmers Federation, said growers were yet to recover from earlier weather shocks when another hailstorm struck the region.
“Without a comprehensive insurance scheme, farmers will continue to bear the brunt of the weather,” Rather said.
He said the government should introduce an insurance mechanism that covers crop losses caused by hailstorms, strong winds and other extreme weather events, arguing that repeated damage was making apple cultivation increasingly risky for small and medium growers.
Rather said that some farmers have lost their entire crop to gusty winds and hailstorms.
The latest storm came less than two weeks after intense winds and hailstorms wreaked havoc on apple orchards in more than two dozen villages of south Kashmir on August 6.
The successive weather events have raised fears of a wider impact on the region’s apple economy, with growers facing losses at a critical stage of the production cycle. Apples damaged by hail are often downgraded in quality and fetch substantially lower prices, while severely damaged fruit may have little or no market value.
A senior official in the Horticulture Department on Sunday said the extent of damage from the latest hailstorm was being assessed.
“Assessment is currently under way,” the official said, adding that some villages had suffered more than 90% damage.
For farmers, however, the immediate concern is not only the scale of the latest losses but the lack of a financial safety net against recurring weather shocks.
With hailstorms and high winds becoming a recurring threat during the growing season, growers say compensation after every disaster is not enough and want a structured insurance system that can provide timely support and allow them to continue investing in their orchards.
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