Speakers at a three-day training programme on agroforestry systems, raising, management and marketing of plantations have suggested that crop diversification, including agroforestry, is one of the effective and viable ways out to bring down losses in agriculture and make it profitable.
The training programme was organised at the Van Vigyan Kendra of the Institute of Forest Biodiversity (IFB) here from January 8 to 10 and was attended by some farmers. Speakers, including Director of the Institute D. Jayaprasad, Ratnaker Jauhari, G. Ravi Shankar Reddy and others, said most of the farmers in the country practice agriculture as a tradition and they hardly go for commercial crops, they are poor at adopting technology and they are not aware of how to time the produce by studying demand and supply system. As a result, they suffer losses more often than not.
One of the effective ways to overcome the problem was to go for crop diversification and include agroforestry in their farming. The concept behind it was the chances to increase the productivity of different kinds of produce from one unit of land, which would ultimately bring down losses, they said.
On the raising of red sanders plantations by farmers, the speakers said its marketing was difficult till the National Biodiversity Authority of India had framing rules facilitating liberalised sale of its produce. However, still there was need for establishing a certifying agency to stated that particular lot of red sanders was sustainably harvested in the farmlands and it was not from the forests. Bar coding of red sanders at nuclear level could help overcome the problem of unscrupulous elements’ efforts to sell the forest produce as the farm produce, they said.
Other agroforestry varieties such as ‘kasturi bhendi, seoni, melia dubia, malabar neem’ and others could also be cultivated by farmers along with their regular crops, they suggested.
