Telangana farmers to get help from Green manure practice

Hyderabad: As part of the sustainable farm practices, the State is encouraging farmers to grow legume crops that can help revive soil fertility and reduce their input costs on chemical fertilisers. The strategy involved is to plough down the crops into the soil giving it a treat of green manure. The plants that have pods and their roots bearing nodules containing nitrogen – fixing bacteria, which work wonders once they go down the plough.

Farmers in many parts of the State are already familiar with the strategy that avoids direct costs on chemical fertilisers. The legumes draw their own nitrogen from the atmosphere and help rejuvenate soil with low nitrogen conditions adding substantially to the yields of the next crop.

The Telangana State Seeds development Corporation will be making some 1.5 lakh quintals of legume seeds enabling the farmers to go in for green manure in a big way during Kharif in 2018. This includes one lakh quintals of ‘Dhaincha’ seed, 31,000 quintals of Sun Hemp and 1,000 quintals of ‘Pilli Pesara’. Much of the seed requirement for the novel programme will be sourced from the seed development corporations of the States with a surplus, according to Kondabala Koteswar Rao, Chairman of the TS Seed Development Corporation, who himself is a progressive farmer.

The State which has successfully made farm activity highly remunerative by helping farmers in large scale application of tank-bed soils to farm lands, can further revolutionise agriculture system by trying out green manure practices. He said the farmers can save at least Rs 2,000 per acre by opting for the green manure strategies.

He informed that the Seeds Development Corporation of Uttar Pradesh had agreed to supply ‘Dhaincha’ seed to the State. In return, Telangana would be meeting the paddy seed requirement of UP farmers. This is a corporation-to-corporation deal and will have no involvement of any private agencies.

These strategies will be propagated in all the districts as part of special drive, he said, adding that several crops will work well under green manuring. The decision of which crop to grow will often have to be based on seed availability and seed costs. Uttar Pradesh has a big surplus of Dhaincha and it suits the local environment conditions as well.

The corporation Chairman explained that only 20 per cent of the seed requirement will be met by the Corporation. The private players have also been reaching out to the farmers with legume crop seeds.