Surinder Sud: Reviving horticulture

FARM VIEW

Rising production costs are hampering the sector's progress. The ICAR has worked out a strategy to counter the trend.

As in the case of crop farming, in horticulture, too, production costs are rising faster than productivity gains, eroding profit margins. Although this sector has been growing rapidly, especially since the 8th plan, when the outlay for horticulture was stepped up to Rs 1,000 crore from merely Rs 24 crore in the previous plan, further progress may be jeopardised if the profitability edge is not maintained. Of course, efforts are on to promote cultivation of fruits and vegetable in a bid to diversify agriculture, the success would depend largely on how these crops can be made economically lucrative.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), which is providing the technological back-up for horticulture promotion, has worked out a five-pronged strategy for this purpose. It essentially aims at development and deployment of new technology for lowering production costs, raising crop yields, enhancing the quality of the produce and reducing post-harvest losses.

According to ICAR Deputy Director-General G Kalloo, an exercise is currently on to fine-tune and implement this strategy in consultation with other bodies concerned, including the Planning Commission. The five aspects to be covered under this approach include upgradation of planting material; improvement in nutrient management; enhancing water-use efficiency; reducing plant protection costs; and improving efficiency at all levels of the production chain through mechanisation and human resource management.

Besides, technology is also being promoted for rejuvenation of old and senile orchards and popularising concepts such as multi-storeyed cropping and integrated production systems, combining horticulture with field crops, fisheries and other income-generation activities.

One of the most significant handicaps of the horticulture sector is the paucity of good quality seeds and other planting materials. The recently approved Rs 200-crore seed project to be implemented through ICAR institutions and agriculture universities is likely to help overcome this constraint by producing good quality and disease-free planting material of fruit crops, tuber crops, coconut, arecanut, oilpalm, cashew, spices and medicinal and aromatic plants, among others.

Where plant nutrition is concerned, the principal problem is low and imbalanced use of essential plant nutrients. As a result, most fields suffer from deficiency of phosphorus, potash and various micro-nutrients. Besides, the carbon content of soils, too, is declining fast. This is not only telling on the production, but also the quality of fruits and vegetables.

Increased use of suitable micro-organisms that help improve the physical health and fertility of soils is proposed as part of the strategy to tackle this problem. A massive drive is likely to be launched for this purpose next month. Over Rs 30 crore have been set apart for encouraging the use of beneficial micro-organisms. In the 11th plan, about Rs 200 crore are expected to be earmarked for this programme.

Improvement in water-use efficiency is sought to be achieved through concepts like drip and sprinkler irrigation. Some headway has already been made in this direction in horticulture fields in a few states, notably Maharashtra, Karnataka and parts of Andhra Pradesh. In fact, plant nutrients can also be dissolved in water and conveyed to the right place near the plant roots in precise quantities. This would help save both water and fertilisers, besides ensuing better harvests.

The cost on plant protection chemicals is proposed to be curtailed by popularising biological methods of controlling pests and diseases. Research work is already in progress to identify predators of crop pests and other bio-control agents, which can be multiplied and released in the fields to obviate the need for spraying pesticides.

Mechanisation is, indeed, deemed most important in cutting down the costs, reducing post-harvest losses and improving product quality, which is vital for fetching good prices in the market. Machines can perform operations such as digging of pits for planting fruit trees, inter-culture, harvesting and others much more efficiently than human labour.

However, rejuvenation of old and senile orchards and plantations is one of the most beneficial ways of increasing horticultural production. A sizeable proportion of the present plantations have very low productivity because the plants are over-aged. Reliable and tested technology is now available for the rehabilitation and rejuvenation of such plantations by replacing old plants with new and improved ones or by grafting the new plants on the old rootstocks. This measure alone can lead to about 30 per cent increase in the country's total horticultural production. Significantly, the National Horticulture Mission has begun giving priority to orchard upgradation.