ICRISAT bid to develop tool to ramp up farm output

​Hyderabad: The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is working on a project to develop a tool which can help with minimising loss, maximising production with effective interventions in the agriculture sector.

Giving details of the project, Dr Shailender Kumar, Principal Scientist, Research Program Innovation Systems for the Dry lands (RPISD) of ICRISAT, said so far the State had data base up to district level, to analyse various parameters influencing the agriculture and allied sectors for policy planning and decision making.

However, this leaves a gap in the mandal level factors, not figuring in the overall agriculture picture and the new project would help bridge this gap, he said.

This tool would help the State in having a fully integrated agriculture mapping system from mandal to State level and will help in drafting an effective agriculture and mitigation plans taking into consideration the micro level factors which can influence overall agriculture scenario in the State.

As part of the project, data of total rain fall, dry days for more than 14 days during monsoon, variations in the rain pattern, total consecutive dray days, soil and crop patterns, land use pattern, moisture data, abnormal deviations recorded, situation in command area, ground water levels and their impact on the agriculture sector would be mapped.

The mandal-wise data, covering all these parameters, recorded in last 30 years would provide as a crucial tool for decision making process.

For example, farmers in Mahbubnagar district cultivate maize. But, it is not a sustainable crop suitable in those areas, he pointed out. Similarly, Mahbubnagar, Nalgonda etc witness long dry spells. District like Adilabad had experienced good rains last year.

But, it had equally experienced nearly 25 dry days which is a pointer of deviation and it need to be taken into consideration as “even small changes will have adverse impact on the climate sensitive crops”, he said.

Sometimes the response time could be shorter depending on the stage of a specific crop and the tool would help in taking suitable decisions in a short span of time.