Mango orchards of Tando Allahyar
A district in lower Sindh on the left bank of the Indus, and why its soil, water and long summer suit the Sindhri mango.
The short answer
Tando Allahyar is a district in lower Sindh, Pakistan, on the left bank of the Indus inland from Hyderabad, and one of the districts that grow most of Pakistan's Sindhri mangoes. Three things make it suit mangoes: deep alluvial soil that suits a tree putting roots down a long way and staying in one spot for fifty years or more, irrigation from the Indus system, and a long, properly hot summer. Our family orchard has been at Village Tando Soomro inside the district since 1930.
Where it is
Tando Allahyar is a district in lower Sindh, on the left bank of the Indus, inland from Hyderabad. It is flat, hot farmland, and a good part of it is mango orchards. If you have eaten a Sindhri, there is a fair chance it came from this district or one next to it.
Our own orchard is at Village Tando Soomro, inside the district. It has been in the family since 1930.
Why mangoes do well here
Three things, mostly.
The soil. This is Indus floodplain, and the land has been built up over a very long time by a river carrying silt down from the north. It is deep and alluvial, which suits a tree that puts roots down a long way and stays in the same spot for fifty years or more.
The water. The Indus irrigation system reaches this part of Sindh, so an orchard is not left entirely at the mercy of rainfall in a region that does not get much of it.
The summer. Lower Sindh gets a long, properly hot season. Mangoes need that heat to build sugar, and the length of the summer is what lets four varieties ripen one after another from May through August rather than all landing at once.
Put together, that is why Sindhri is a Sindhi mango rather than a Punjabi one. It is a variety that belongs to this specific combination of soil, water and heat.
What the district is like
Mango growing here is not industrial. A lot of it is family land, worked by people who grew up on it, with orchards that were planted by somebody's grandfather and are now looked after by their grandchildren. Knowledge moves between generations by standing under a tree together, not through training courses.
That has advantages and it has costs. The advantage is that the people making decisions about a tree have often known that tree their whole lives. The cost is that very little of it is written down, and when a generation does not take up the work, what they knew goes with them.
The year in an orchard here
Nothing much looks like it is happening for most of the year, which is misleading. The winter is for pruning and for getting the trees into shape. February brings the flowering, and that is the month everything hinges on, because the number of flowers that set fruit decides the size of the crop five months later.
Through March and April the fruit fills out and the heat builds. By May the orchard is busy: picking, carrying, grading and packing, all of it compressed into a few weeks. Crates go out by road. Then it stops, and the trees are left alone to recover for next year.
It is a lopsided way to make a living. Almost all of the income arrives in a quarter of the year, and the other three quarters are spent looking after trees that are not producing anything yet.
The pressures
The climate is the obvious one. The weather matters enormously to a mango crop, the flowering in February effectively setting what you pick in June, and the weather has become harder to predict. Water availability is the other constant worry in this part of Sindh.
Then there is the market. Growers here are a long way from the people who eventually eat the fruit, and most of the value is added after the mango leaves the district. A box that sells for a high price in London returns very little of that to the orchard it came from.
Where we fit
We are one family orchard in a district full of them. We are not the biggest and we do not claim to be. What we have is a long run on the same piece of land, four generations of it, and a variety we know better than any other because we have grown it longest.
Our grandfather's generation sold into a market that never asked where the fruit came from. We would rather people knew. That is the whole reason this site exists.
The full family history covers those four generations properly, from Allah Bukhsh planting the first trees in the 1930s through to the orchard as it is run today.