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Several farmer unions under the banner of the Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers’ Movement, on Wednesday, submitted a memorandum to the Union Minister of State of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry, and Dairying Sanjeev Kumar Balyan, demanding to keep agriculture and dairy out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) free trade agreement.

FnB News

The food & agriculture technology and products market is growing in parallel to the increasing demand and consumption of livestock-based products and seafood. Increasing demand for convenience, packaged, and processed food products and government support to adopt modern agricultural techniques are some of the driving factors for the food & agriculture technology and products market. Use of big data in agricultural farms and new technologies used for food processing is creating profitable opportunities for key players in the market globally.

Forbes

In the age of Internet of Things (IoT), farmers face a bright forecast for integrating emerging tech into their businesses. While agriculture may appear slower than other industries to evolve, many farmers are embracing innovations—from wearables for cows to artificial intelligence (AI)-based machine learning algorithms for insights on weather patterns, crop yield, soil health and more.

The Slap Clap

Farm mechanization automates the agricultural process by utilizing the agricultural machinery with the aim to increase the productivity and profitability of farm workers. This mechanized farming technique helps the farmers to gain accuracy in farm operations, delivers precision in metering and placement of inputs, lowers the available input losses, enhances the utilization efficiency of expensive inputs such as seed, chemical, fertilizer, irrigation, and water, and reduces the unit cost of the total produce. Farm mechanization also aids in the conservation of the agricultural produce and by-products from quantitative and qualitative damages, enables the establishment of agro-processing enterprises for additional income, and employment generation from farm produce.

The Indian Express

Free power to farmers in Punjab is considered a drain on underground water and state exchequer both. While the draft farmer policy proposes no free power to those with over 10 acres land. When the subsidy was rolled out for the first time a motor of 5 hp (horsepower) would suffice to pump out water in the fields. Over the years, the farmers are now using motors between 25 hp to 35 hp as the underground water has receded and the level gone woefully down. As per an estimate of agriculture department, the farmers have themselves spent Rs 17,500 crore on deepening the borewells and installing bigger motors.

The Statesman

The latest report of the UN entitled “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018 states: “Climate variability and extreme conditions are a key-driver behind the recent rise in global hunger and one of the leading causes of severe food crises.’ The rise in mean temperature of the order of 2 degrees C to 3 degrees C will lead to a reduction of the wheat crop in North India, resulting in a loss of 6 to 7 million tons of wheat every year. As temperatures continue to increase, corn (maize) ~ the most widely grown crop in the world ~ appears to be the most vulnerable to heat stress.

The Times of India

As the kharif season is set to end in another 20 days, farmers in Telangana were a bit worried. But, rains in the last few days have raised fresh hopes of completing sowing as per the target. According to a report on pre-final kharif sowing submitted by the agriculture department, out of 1.7 crore acres of estimated acreage in the state, sowing in 1.3 crore acres (70%) has been completed. Also, sowing of cash crops like cotton and turmeric is almost complete with 90% sowing.

Down to Earth

The Punjab and Haryana high court recently recommended that minimum support price (MSP) be made farmers’ legal right and it be set at three times the cost of production. “As far as the agriculture is concerned, the MSP should be three times above the cost of production of major crops to save farmers from distress and also to procure the food grains for public distribution considering the cost including actual expenses in cash and kind, the loan on lease land, impeding the cost of labour, own capital assets, interest on valuable capital etc,” read the HC order.