Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today said the state government will provide required equipments and machinery at subsidised rates to encourage farmers to grow alternate crops like maize and soybean in order to curtail area under water-guzzling paddy crop.
"In order to motivate farmers for crop diversification, all out efforts are being made by the state government and a special campaign to make the farmers aware about the merits of this flagship programme has already been started," said Badal at the four-day 'Progressive Punjab Agriculture Summit' (PPAS) at Chhaparchiri here.
He said that the need of the hour was to make agriculture machinery available to the farmers at subsidised rates.
Showing keen interest in automatic cane harvesting machine which would peel sugarcane and automatically load it in the trolley after cutting it into pieces, the Chief Minister asked state's officials to prepare a report regarding requirement of these machines so that the government could provide these machines to cane growers and sugar mills.
The manufacturers of the machine informed the Chief Minister that the machine harvests cane over one acre land in two and half hours at a cost of Rs 8,000-10,000 per acre.
He asked the officers to apprise to ensure that the farmers get this subsidy on time.
The Chief Minister also got the detailed information about the tissue culture technique adopted by the PepsiCo company for producing quality potato seeds.
The company officials apprised Badal that the company provides machinery for cultivating, grading and digging crop to the farmers free of cost.
Meanwhile, on the third day of summit, experts asked farmers to look beyond wheat-paddy rotation by advocating them to go for fish, pig and goat farming.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr W S Lakra Director and Vice Chancellor Central Institute of Fisheries Education said Punjab with 1.09 million hectares of salt affected area has tremendous scope for inland aquaculture, adding that this land was unfit for sustainable agriculture crop.
