Tata Coffee gets innovative to tackle pests

Tata Coffee, the Bangalore-based integrated plantation company, through its in-house research and development (R&D) in farming practices, has been able to develop solutions to address productivity and pest-related issues.

The company, in its directors' report to its shareholders said, the in-house R&D of the company has been successful in developing a host of solutions at its estates.

As part of the coffee varietal trial experiment, a study was undertaken on location-specific high-yielding and disease-tolerant selection for planting in the estates has been successful.

In a step towards moving to organic cultivation, the company has been able to develop a large-scale manufacture of compost with improved technology to enhance soil fertility.

This has been achieved through the introduction of the Trichoderma fungus to hasten the process of composting and as a means to control soil-borne disease. The addition of coffee effluent to hasten the process of composting and to increase the nutritive value has also borne fruits.

Through bio-control research, a host of solutions has been developed like the large scale culturing of Trichoderma fungus for use in the biological control of pepper wilt disease and root diseases of coffee.

For the effective integrated pest management, the company installed berry borer traps with the use of organic solvents to check the berry borer on a large scale.

To tackle the white stem borer in coffee, the large-scale installation of pheromone trap (a cardboard box with bug hormones inside to capture moths) as a monitoring tool has been adopted in endemic areas. Also, in-house formulated neem oil has been developed for pest and diseases.

As for soil fertility, it is being monitored through soil and leaf analysis and the results have been calibrated to formulate the optimum fertiliser recommendation and soil amendment application.

The fertiliser programme is rationalised based on the soil nutrient status which is optimum and adequate for enhancing crop production and productivity.

Monitoring the availability of micronutrients like 'zinc, copper, iron, manganese' and secondary nutrients like 'sulphur, calcium and magnesium' to improve the productivity of coffee, pepper and cardamom has been developed.