Use of smart machinery can check stubble burning, farm experts suggest

-IANS

New Delhi: If the farmers of Punjab and Haryana were to adopt smart techniques and use appropriate machinery, say experts, they won’t hog the headlines every winter for the wrong reasons— causing smog in the national capital because of stubble-burning. The Borlaug Institute of South Asia (BISA), a non-profit set up in 2011 to harness the latest technology in agriculture to improve farm productivity, has claimed to have reduced the volume of agricultural residue burning in some villages it has selected for smart farming in the last few years. One of the successful examples is a cluster of villages in Haryana’s Karnal district, where stubble-burning has shrunk to just 20 per cent of the cultivated land, local farmers said. Vikas Chaudhary, who cultivates 35 acres of land in Taraori, said this year paddy straw was burnt on just 400-500 acres of the total 2,400 acres of agricultural land in the village. He said BISA has suggested an alternative in the form of a new machine — a Happy Seeder — which allowseffective seeding without removing the straw residue. Conceived by the Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Happy Seeder is like any Zero TillMachine with the additional feature of a chopper that clears the loose straw which creates problems in sowing. BISA is a collaborative effort involving the El Batan, Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) and the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR). Earlier, farmers would cut the entire crop while reaping under conventional methods, leaving very little straw on the field.

However, the advent of combine harvesters — machines that combine the three separate operations of reaping, threshing and winnowing into one process — the magnitude of straw burning has increased since it cuts just the spike of paddy plants, leaving stems intact. In the past few years, farmers have become accustomed to using Rotavators — soil tilling machine — before sowing seeds. Since Rotavators cannot work unless the agriculture residue is cleared, farmers have no option but to set the stubble on fire as manual removal is not a viable option owing to the huge cost involved and small time window to cultivate winter crops such as wheat, said M.L. Jat, PrincipalScientist with the CIMMYT. “In our smart farming villages, we have introduced Happy Seeder machines which facilitate seed sowing though there is stubble in the field. It retains soil fertility as well,” Jat said. “And the results are positive. Not just the output has remained unaffected, but input cost has gone down as well. We have found that stubble provided nutrients to soil, minimising the requirement of fertiliser.”

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