The crops of Pakistan, and the two seasons that govern them

Rabi and kharif: the two cropping seasons

The division is monsoon-driven rather than administrative. Kharif crops are planted to catch the summer rains and the high river flows that follow snowmelt, and they are harvested as the weather turns. Rabi crops are planted into the residual moisture and the cooler months, need far less water, and are harvested before the heat arrives in earnest. The word rabi is Arabic for spring, which is when it is gathered; kharif is autumn, for the same reason.

The practical consequence for a farm is that the two seasons compete for the same land and the same water, and the choice between them is the single biggest economic decision most Pakistani farmers make each year. A field in cotton through the summer cannot also be in rice. A late kharif harvest delays the rabi sowing, and a wheat crop sown late yields less — which is why sugarcane, which occupies ground for the best part of a year, sits awkwardly against everything else in the rotation.

There is a third window, zaid or zaid-kharif, running roughly March to June between the two main seasons. It is short, it needs irrigation rather than rain, and it is used for melons, fodder and quick vegetables rather than for staples.

The four crops that dominate the cropped area

Wheat is the largest crop in Pakistan by area and the one the food system is built on. It is a rabi crop, sown behind the kharif harvest and gathered in March and April in Sindh and April and May further north, and it is the only crop with a government-announced support price, which shapes planting decisions across the country. Our own wheat goes to the chakki rather than a mill.

Rice and cotton are the two great kharif crops and they occupy different ground: rice runs in the flooded basins of the Punjab and lower Sindh, cotton across the drier southern Punjab and upper Sindh. Basmati is the export crop and commands a premium; the coarser IRRI varieties feed the domestic market. Cotton feeds the textile industry, which is the largest single earner of foreign exchange in Pakistan, so a bad cotton year is felt well beyond the farm.

Sugarcane is the fourth, and it is the awkward one. It stays in the ground for ten to twelve months, drinks more water than anything else grown at scale here, and its price is set in negotiation with mills rather than in a market. It persists because in a good year it pays better per acre than the alternatives.

How much of Pakistan actually runs on agriculture

Agriculture is roughly a fifth to a quarter of Pakistan's economy and employs something close to two in five working people — a much larger share of employment than of output, which tells you most of what you need to know about productivity per worker here. It also supplies the raw material for the textile sector, so its reach into the industrial economy is larger than the headline share suggests.

The country's agricultural exports are concentrated in rice, cotton and cotton yarn, and horticulture — mangoes, kinnow, dates and onions. What Pakistan imports, meanwhile, includes a great deal of edible oil and pulses, which is a structural gap rather than a temporary one: the country grows nowhere near enough oilseed for its own consumption.

Almost all of this depends on the Indus basin irrigation system, which is among the largest contiguous irrigation networks in the world. Pakistani agriculture is not rain-fed farming with irrigation added; it is irrigated farming with some rain, and that distinction sits underneath every problem described below.

The problems the sector is actually facing

Water is first and it is not close. Flood irrigation still dominates, canal losses are heavy, and the groundwater that makes up the shortfall is being pumped down faster than it recharges across much of the Punjab and Sindh. In parts of lower Sindh the water that comes up is now saline enough to damage the soil it is poured onto. We have written separately about what drip irrigation costs and saves on our own ground, because that is the part of this problem a single farm can act on.

Yields are the second. Pakistani wheat and cotton yields per acre sit well below what the same varieties produce in comparable climates, and the reasons are unglamorous — late sowing, poor-quality seed, unbalanced fertiliser use, and a shortage of the kind of extension advice that used to reach small farms. None of these need new technology to fix.

The third is that most Pakistani farms are small and getting smaller as land is divided between heirs, which puts mechanisation, storage and any real negotiating position out of reach. A grower with three acres and no way to store a crop sells at whatever the mandi offers on the day it is ready. That is the mechanism behind most of the farm-gate-to-retail gap discussed on our price pages, and it is not going to be solved by any individual farmer being cleverer.

Climate is the fourth and it compounds all of the above: hotter springs shorten the wheat grain-filling window, the monsoon has become less reliable in its timing, and the 2022 floods showed what a single bad year can do to a sector with no buffer in it.

What this means on our own land

We farm in Tando Allahyar in lower Sindh, which puts us in the earliest part of the national calendar — our wheat goes in around November and comes off in March, weeks ahead of the upper Punjab, and our mango season opens the country's. The vegetables run through both seasons under irrigation, the fish ponds run continuously, and the herd does not care what season it is.

Sindh's particular constraints are heat and water quality rather than cold. Nothing here is limited by frost; a great deal is limited by what comes up the tubewell in May. That is why our irrigation spending has gone into drip on the orchard rather than into anything else, and why the seasonal calendar we publish is a Sindh calendar rather than a national one — the windows shift by three or four weeks by the time you reach Faisalabad.