From high cost to lack of policies, fitting the links for smarter farming

There's some good news from the ground and the labs on sustainable farmer techniques but, the first of a two part series looks at the missing links

A few weeks after Vinod Kumar passed his matric examination, his farmer-father started sending him to the Central Soil Salinity Research Institute in this district, to check on new seed varieties of wheat or rice they could grow.

Kumar continued to visit the institute all through his graduation years because he wanted to farm better. During one such visit in 2012, Kumar, then 26, learnt a team of scientists was looking for farms to set up an experiment. They wished to compare conventional farming with climate-smart agriculture techniques, that would help farmers grow more, increase their income and adapt to