Increasing income of farmers and workers must be attempted together, one doesn’t necessarily lead to another. It is also true that sometime marginal farmers are worse off than laborers because of lack of mobility and thus limited opportunity to benefit from higher wages from distant labor markets.
If productivity increases, work and wages may eventually increase. The cost reduction is first priority for most farmers. If that is done then pressure on increasing prices will be reduced to that extent.
What should we do about field crops: a) Reduce the cost through i) reduction in water use, phase out flood irrigation in five years through education, demo and on farm trials with full guarantee of covering any loss due to at least fifty per cent reduction in water use without decline in yield; ii) reduction in fertilizer use by encouraging increased organic content in soil, green manuring, fallowing, and growth promoters, spray on crops rather than in soil with almost 70 per cent loss in many cases, iii) compulsive use of IPM rather than only chemical pesticide use, massive extension effort for time bound reduction in pesticide use, worker safety, and reduction in environmental adverse effects; iv) few rows of non hybrid seed rows surrounding with hybrid seed may give almost same yield, as whole hybrid seeds, farmer’s own selections to be popularized, as vigorously as scientist bred varieties, v) improve soil health through micro-nutrient application which in turn will also improve human and animal health apart from reducing costs;
In situ value addition: unless we start a agro and food processing revolution, the farm incomes cannot be increased substantially. When farmers start selling in grams and not quintals, a real revolution will follow. Flax seed is the pointer about things to come in the area of functional foods.
farmERS: Farmer emergency response system
In each agro-climatic zone, there will be a fleet of mobile food processing and bulk packing machinery units. Wherever there is distress due to excessive production by small farmers, these vans like ambulance under 108 service, reach, offer to process at concessional cost, pack and either give back to farmers or have private sector partners lined up to buy the processed and procured value added farm produce at reasonable price.
The problem of pesticide residues in food and consequent adverse health effects on workers who spray and consumers who eat such products has been ignored. The industry puts across a lot of hoardings about which pesticides can farmers use but puts up hardly any hoarding on safe use pf the same. Relative promotion of biocontrol vis a vis chemical pesticides is negligible. About twenty years ago, several states had done experiments on IPM and found that IPM (integrated pest management) succeeded in reducing the use of chemical pesticides without affecting yields adversely. But then the project was discontinued for reason best known to the state governments. It is time to bring focus back on the subject if farmers suicides have to be stopped, and cost of cultivation has to be reduced.
The nature of extension system and approach has to be completely redesigned to make location specific agro-meteorological information and sensor based soil, plant, water and pest conditions useful for farmers’ expert systems. More on AI applications for BIG data analysis with Internet of things, thoughts and feelings ( IOTT) in Agriculture, health and education next week.
