The Hindu Business Line : Zero-till can add to the till

Falling costs, rising incomes. Thus reads a refreshingly reassuring section-title in an essay on zero-tillage included in MillionsFed: Proven successes in agricultural development, edited by David J. Spielman and Rajul Pandya-Lorch ( www.ifpri.org ). Zero tillage, for starters, is a cultivation practice that not only helps preserve soil fertility and conserves scarce water, but also boosts yields and increases farmers’ profits by reducing their production costs, explains Olaf Erenstein, the author. “Instead of ploughing their fields and then planting seeds, farmers who use zero tillage deposit seeds into holes drilled into the unploughed fields.”

An estimated 6.2 lakh wheat farmers in northern India have adopted various forms of zero tillage on an estimated 1.76 million hectares of land, and average annual gains amount to $180-340 per household, the essay informs.

Eliminating the ploughing step saves time, and also avoids disturbing the soil in ways that contribute to soil degradation and the growth of weeds, notes Erenstein. “By sowing seeds in unploughed fields in small slots or trenches that are carved out by tractor-drawn seed drills, farmers can also avoid drying out the soil and, thus, can use water more sparingly.”

G. B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology developed the first prototype of an Indian zero-tillage seed drill; “in 2003, the average price of a zero-till drill was $325 in India, compared with $559 in Pakistan.”

And the payback may be quick, considering the dual advantages in yield and cost-saving. The tractor-drawn zero-tillage drills, for instance, allow farmers to make just one pass through their fields rather than the eight passes typically needed during traditional cultivation; as a result, “farmers achieve an immediate — and recurrent — cost savings amounting to about 15 to 16 per cent of their operational costs, or about $52 per hectare of land.” On fuel consumption, the essay cites research findings that farmers can save 36 litres of diesel per hectare of land, an 80 per cent savings over conventional wheat tillage.

The increase in yield — ranging between 5 and 7 per cent — is closely associated with the timelier planting of wheat, the author explains. “If farmers cannot manage to plant wheat before mid-November, heat stress at the end of the wheat season can reduce their yields by 1 to 1.5 per cent a day. By allowing farmers to plant wheat more quickly after the rice harvest, zero tillage can reduce these yield losses.”

Exciting collection.

Famines and frustration

Widespread unemployment, black-marketing, bribery, scarcity, food adulteration… A description of these finds place in ‘The uneasy vigil (September 1947-February 1952),’ a chapter in Crises and Creativities by Amit Kumar Gupta ( www.orientblackswan.com ).

“Women noisily demonstrated before the Writers’ Building (Secretariat) demanding an increase in the inadequate rationing of food (8 ounces of cereal per head per day, or 3.5 pounds per week) which did not last for even three full days in a week. They forced the premier to meet them and promise 15 ounces of cereal per day,” he narrates.

Engaging account.

With the rising of prices of all food items (as currently?), the situation was ‘grim,’ as the then food minister acknowledged. “Black-marketing continued to flourish in such circumstances, and adulteration of food became rampant. Whenever a loaded lorry moved on the streets of Calcutta, the common man and woman perceived it as a carrier of adulterated food items.”

Sample these ‘formulae’ that Gupta mentions: Ground soap stone was known to be mixed with flour, and argemone seeds were mixed with mustard seeds. “The All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Medicine, Calcutta, attributed the dropsy epidemic in West Bengal about this time to adulterated cooking medium — the mustard oil.”

Adding to the woes of people were the ‘cloth famine’ of the late 1940, and ‘fish famine’ of 1949. A phenomenal shortage of fish resulted in West Bengal when its import from East Pakistan was subjected to heavy customs duties, leading to a drop in supply from 2,000 maunds to 500 maunds per day, the book recounts.

“The drudgery of the day-to-day life, and the strain of living by borrowing, especially among the nimna bhadralok families, appeared appalling to them when their children had to suffer unemployment on the completion of their studies.”

The gratuitous advice to opt for technical education and training rather than for graduation did not help matters much, Gupta chronicles. “The accumulated frustration of the educated unemployed could explode at any point as it seemed to have done on October 18, 1949…”

D. MURALI

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Of ethics and regulation

Pitfalls in transition to new legislation

Look beyond MSP

Power dynamics in Pakistan

Case for a global wage floor

A remedy not apt for the disease

Zero-till can add to the till

Who should bell the cat?

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