Mangoes, citrus and cane

After Taunsa Barrage opened, the Muzaffargarh Canal and the Taunsa–Panjnad Link were cut across this plain; the link alone carries 12,000 cusecs over 58 km. Kot Addu's municipal committee counts two main canals and eight sub-canals crossing the tehsil, and puts its cultivated area at about 425,000 acres.

The district gazetteer describes two landscapes in Tehsil Kot Addu. On the canal side, rich loam grows wheat, rice, sugarcane and cotton — though years of cane are bringing waterlogging and salt. On the other side are sand dunes, farmed with rain or levelled and watered by drip lines and rain guns for wheat and gram. Around Chowk Sarwar Shaheed, it notes, a large number of citrus orchards have been planted, and more are coming.

Cane and the mills

Sugarcane is the district's big crop. Punjab's Crop Reporting Service put Kot Addu District at 91,000 acres of cane in 2024–25, yielding about 2.76 million tons (3.16 million the year before) — more than double the cane area of what remains of Muzaffargarh District. Two mills stand in the tehsil. Fatima Sugar Mills, near Sanawan, dates from 1989 and now crushes up to 20,000 tons of cane a day; in 2024–25 it made 135,600 tons of refined sugar. Sheikhoo Sugar Mills at Anwar Abad began crushing in 1994 and reached 24,000 tons a day in 2022, which the company calls Pakistan's largest single-tandem mill.

Wheat covered 235,000 acres in 2024–25 and gave about 317,000 tons. Cotton is shrinking — 22,000 acres, down from 32,000 — while sesame has spread to more than 40,000 acres.

Mangoes in the heat

Mangoes are the region's pride — Sindhri, Chaunsa, Dusehri, Anwar Ratol, Langra — but there is no separate official mango figure for Kot Addu District yet; the 2019 gazetteer's 46,500 acres covered the whole of old Muzaffargarh. The heat is the new story. In June 2026 Dawn quoted Rabia Sultan, who grows mangoes on nearly 100 acres in Kot Addu: around 40 per cent of the crop in her area had been damaged, after a February with rain 88.8 per cent below normal. In July, a Kot Addu farm was among the stalls at the Mango Festival in Muzaffargarh.

The barrage that brought the canals also took something away. The gazetteer notes that it greatly reduced the old sailaba farming on flood-fed land: much of the riverain area facing Kot Addu became ponded water where nothing can be grown.