The Economic Times – Online

Asserting that it is committed to farmers’ interest and farming, the government on Tuesday said in Lok Sabha that there was no need to have a separate budget for agriculture. Replying to a question in the Lower House, Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar said keeping a separate budget for agriculture would neither benefit the country nor the farmers. He was replying to a question asked by DMK member T R Baalu why the government does not consider bringing a separate budget for agriculture to address the problems of the farmers. During global recession, the DMK member said, India “withstood” because of the agriculture. “Our chief minister M K Stalin ...

The New Indian Express – Online

In a way of leading by example, the Agriculture Department has harvested two traditional rice varieties on its sprawling five-acre seed farm in Neikuppai Pudhur village in Lalgudi Block with an average output of 2.2 tonnes per acre — completely through organic methods. The seeds would be distributed to farmers to promote organic farming. Though paddy cultivation has been on the rise for the past three consecutive years, the area under traditional cultivation through organic farming continues to decline. This year, the acreage has dropped below two per cent of the overall paddy cultivation for the season. In addition to its efforts of improving the numbers by organising awareness campaigns, distributing seeds at ...

DownToEarth – Online

Generally, the farmer’s fate is drooped with a fortune from sowing to harvesting. A farmer may confront a series of adversities and climatic vagaries during agricultural production, such as erratic rainfall, stone hail, drought, flood, and so on. In addition, challenges like post-harvest losses, storage and unavailability of accessible proper marketing are further aggravating the problem. Currently, the human-wildlife and / or human-crops conflict, forest fires, organic matter deficit soil, monoculture, plant disease and infestation, migration and the reluctance of youth towards agriculture are a new array of problems. The traditional approach of low input-based extensive and diversified agricultural practices termed as ‘crop diversification’ could be an alternate approach that might be used to save farming ...

CNBC TV18 – Online

Agriculture in India — like its enterprises — is largely small scale. While we lament the dearth of medium scale enterprises in the manufacturing sector, we observe that the agricultural sector is trying to achieve scale and capacity through collectivisation. Farmers, when they come together to work as one entity in any phase of their production, are referred to as collectives. This move towards collectivism has been observed on the marketing side for a while, in the formation of farmer cooperative marketing societies, and on the production side more recently, as farmer producer organisations (FPOs). These kinds of collectives have been successful in overcoming certain constraints particular to Indian agriculture, such as fragmented land holding ...