DownToEarth – Online

Recently, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution initiated by India with Bangladesh, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Russia and Senegal to mark 2023 as the ‘International Year of Millets’.

This move will help bring global attention on millets, which are nutritionally and ecologically essential and considered beneficial traditional crops.

The recent farm protests bring attention to the two chief food crops — wheat and rice. These were considered the harbingers of food security since the mid-1960s, when the green revolution-led agricultural policy lent too much focus to food crops.

However, this focus soon became skewed towards excluding bio-diversity principles and crop diversification, resulting in a dominating mono-cropping pattern because the approaches were not holistic.

The Courier – Online

The constant growth of the agriculture sector, high farm mechanization rate, and burgeoning on struction activities due to the rapid urbanization will drive the Indian tractor market during the forecast period (2020–2030). Moreover, the rising investments by the major tractor manufacturers in the country willfacilitate the market growth. Nearly 70% of Indians are dependent on the agriculture sector for their livelihood. The production of food crops, fruits, and vegetables requires tractors for sowing and harvesting. Owing to the vast size of the farming sector, tractors will always be significant for India.

The Swaddle – Online

Global agricultural production has dropped by 21% over the last 60 years due to global warming caused by humans, a new study has found. That roughly amounts to seven years’ worth of crops lost.

The findings not only indicate the destructive impact of man-made climate change on agriculture but also paint a grim picture of food insecurity as low global agriculture yields may translate into less food production.

Published in Nature Climate Change, the study measured agricultural productivity by comparing inputs like labor and equipment with final crop yield — and then factored in the impact of climate change on agriculture productivity.

Forbes India – Online

Covid-19 uprooted Clover. For two-and-a-half years, Clover, a greenhouse agritech startup supplying fresh produce to hotels, restaurants and cafes across Bengaluru and Hyderabad, was content with its B2B business. The co-founders—Avinash BR, Gururaj S Rao, Arvind M and Santosh Narasipura—dabbled into hydroponic farming in 2017 as a weekend vacation gig, started Clover in May 2018, and raised seed round from venture capital firms Accel and Mayfield in December. Another round of $5.5 million from Omnivore, Accel and Mayfield happened last February, and reportedly a million dollars from Alteria Capital came after three months. The plan was to expand operations to Mumbai, Pune and Chennai.  With Clover, the four co-founders were taking a stab at solving a deep-rooted ...

Sierra club – Online

On March 6, thousands of farmers in India blocked a major six-lane highway bordering the capital city of New Delhi for five hours. The demonstration marked 100 days of one of the largest protest movements in history. Farmers from nearby agricultural regions have been camping out at border points around New Delhi since November to protest three agriculture reform bills enacted in September by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The government claimed that the bills will deregulate the market for agricultural goods, raising farmers’ income and bringing in much-needed development to a sector that contributes 18 percent of India’s GDP.

But farmers fear that the new rules will eventually eliminate minimum-price guarantees for their crops and, without the government as an intermediary, ...

SME Times – Online

Since Independence, the agriculture sector has remained the main source of national income and occupation in India. In 1947, 72 per cent of the total working population was engaged in agricultural sector, but still a majority of Indias poor (some 770 million people or about 70 per cent) inhabit the rural areas.

Though due to the high growth rates of the industrial and services sectors, the share of agricultural share in India’s economy has progressively declined to less than 15 per cent, yet its importance in the country’s economic and social development can’t be denied.

Forbes India – Online

There is a huge opportunity for transformational sustainability in a sector that employs nearly 60 percent of the Indian population–agriculture. This opportunity exists despite the ambitious sustainability targets that have been set already and the tremendous work being done in achieving them.

Growth inhibitors in the agricultural sectorEven though India has become a surplus agri-producer, the sector still remains unsustainable, with misdirected subsidies, storage and logistical shortfalls, food wastage, archaic farming practices, inadequate access to finance, inequity in the value chain, land degradation, water depletion, and crop burning—just to name a few challenges. We need to bring together the principles of sustainable growth, innovative technologies, green financing, a progressive regulatory ecosystem, and leverage corporate social responsibility to overcome these ...