Here is an innovative idea conceived by a scientist and agriculture engineer Nalabolu Kishore, who dreams of arresting soil erosion and achieving water conservation at one go by utilising his newly developed ‘ANGRAU Diker’, while doing its job of sowing.
The newly-developed Diker can be attached to any existing tractor and seed planter for sowing groundnut, red gram, castor, bajra, cotton, chickpea or korra millets or any other crop that requires wide-spaced sowing.
At an experimental sowing demonstration on the premises of Agriculture Research Station, Rekulakunta in Anantapur district, the Diker showed the ease with which four rows of seed insertion could be done with dikes created between them at a 32 cm gap with a dike (depression or hole) dimension of 15 cm width 15 cm depth.
Mr. Kishore explaining the benefits of the Diker to The Hindu , said each depression in the field had the capacity to hold 500 ml of rainwater and 1,12,000 dikes created in 1 hectare, the land will have a holding capacity of 60,000 litres taking into account evaporation losses. “This water in small puddles will be available close to the root system of the crop, providing maximum advantage. In groundnut crop, the pods do not penetrate down beyond 10 cm, hence this was ideal depth for it,” he observed.
Four bent arrow-shaped iron rods attached a rotating shaft get dragged by a tractor, that has a seed planter attached to it to introduce seed at a predetermined gap between the rows. The farmer needs to just fill the seed box and do the entire activity at one go single handed, saving expensive manual labour. Guided by Principal Scientist and Head ARS Rekulakunta R. Veeraraghavaiah, Mr. Kishore has taken up this three-year project of developing this implemsent, that will undergo several changes depending on the outcome from yield and ease of operation etc.
“To optimise its use, we have come up with having several variants of Diker to meet the needs of each and every crop, while bushes are fixed to wheel holding the ploughing arrows, the spacing between them and the depth to which they should dig into the soil can be adjusted,” he explained.
This Diker helps in curbing runoff of fertile topsoil during a rain, arresting water flow and conserving it very close to the roots and was most useful for all dryland crops. These dikes are useful in in situ water conservation and are now being termed as micro farm ponds.
