Dushanbe. December 10. Asia-Plus -- More than 44.000 tons of cotton seeds have been procured by cotton-growing farms of the republic for next year’s sowing season, head of the Tajik Agriculture Ministry’s Crop Production Department Saidmurod Bahriddinov told Asia-Plus.

According to him, 30% of the procured seeds refer to highly productive sorts, namely, “Elita”, “R-1”, “R-2”, “R-3” and so forth.

“In previous years 80-90% of the procured cotton seeds referred to conditional sorts with low reproduction capacity,” Bahriddinov stressed.

According to him, cotton processing enterprises and factories have already started to process, clean, calibrate and treat the procured seeds.

“This year’s procurement process began earlier and this will create a solid basis for the next year’s harvest,” Bahriddinov noted.

According to Saidjamol Saidov, director of the Institute of Agriculture of the Tajik Academy of Sciences, this year the institute provided cotton growing farms of the country with new high-yielding sorts of cotton seeds, including “Iram-1”, “Sorbon”, “Zarnigor” and fine-fiber cotton sorts such as “750-B”, “748-B” and “9326-B”.

“These sorts will let cotton growers to get high yield if all agrotechnical requirements are followed during the cultivation,” he stressed. “Our institute is about to provide recommendations and a special map covering cultivation technologies for these sorts. We are confident that cotton growing farms will harvest 25 centners from hectare if all requirements and recommendations are followed.”

This year’s area sown to cotton made 170.4 thousand ha with crop capacity of 17.4 centners. The harvest made 295.000 tons.