Adoption of natural pest control methods, protection of farmer-friendly insects and birds and planting of flowering plants around farms will not only control pests but also scale down the use of pesticides and fertilizers, according to Director of Agriculture M. Rajendran.
Addressing a capacity-building training programme for the youth in agriculture at Kottur village near here, he said that Tamil Nadu and Punjab were leading in the country in using the maximum quantum of chemical fertilizers. Use of natural farming would improve soil fertility, he noted.
Despite natural calamities like lack of rain and drought, the State had been achieving good food production for the past three years.
The total food production was 101 lakh tonnes in 2011-12, 110 lakh tonnes in 2012-13 and 125 lakh tonnes in 2013-14, he said, adding inter-cropping and multi-cropping would boost income of farmers.
Expressing grave concerns over the excessive application of fertilizers, he said that organic food crops produced in Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh fetched better prices – four times more than those of food crops grown on chemical fertilizers in other States.
Farmers killed snakes and chased away owls, from their fields and this resulted in multiplication of rats.
Two rats would multiply into 1,200 rats in two years. Flowering plants would attract farm-friendly insects such as spider and wasp which would kill anti-farmer pests. In the first 30 days, no crop required any pesticide to protect it. They would withstand pest attack naturally, he added.
Stating that law and order problem would crop up only where there was no farm activities, he said 70,000 farm ponds were constructed to improve groundwater level and solar motor pumps were offered to farmers.
