Jain Irrigation Ltd sees big potential in the country’s coffee sector for its tissue culture and irrigation solutions, where it aims to replicate the success it achieved in other crops such as banana and pomegranate.

The company has partnered with the State-run Central Coffee Research Institute (CCRI) to produce tissue-cultured coffee plants that may be commercialised in the next few years.

“We have produced and supplied about 4,000 tissue cultured coffee plants to CCRI for field trials this year,” said Anil B Patil, Head, Tissue Culture, Jain Irrigation Systems.

The company has been working with CCRI over the past two years in standardising the protocol or the recipe for production of plants through tissue culture and aims to commercialise the same in the near future.

Y Raghuramulu, Director of the Balehonnur-based CCRI, said tissue cultured plants produced by Jain Irrigation are being evaluated in field trials for performance — vegetative growth and genetic stability. “Jain has redefined the tissue culture protocol that was available with us,” he added.

Though CCRI had standardised the tissue culture protocol several years ago, it could not propagate the plants commercially due to the complexities involved and lack of infrastructure.

Several companies unsuccessfully tried to produce the tissue culture plants in collaboration with CCRI.

However, Jain with its expertise in tissue culture, has been able to propagate the coffee plants on a large scale. The use of tissue cultured plants, which are disease free and genetically uniform, is expected to boost coffee productivity.

Low productivity has been plaguing the Indian coffee sector with planters in Karnataka — the largest producing State — registering an average crop of around 775 kg/hectare of arabica and around 1,480 kg of robusta.

Poor output

Average Indian productivity has been hovering around 537 kg/ha for arabica and 1,196 kg/ha for robusta. However, the productivity in India has been lower than major producing countries such as Brazil and Vietnam.

The major reasons cited for lower productivity are ageing plantations and lack of improved varieties.

Also, the company sees big demand for micro-irrigation solutions, including drip and fertigation facilities, as coffee growers in the ecologically-sensitive regions of the Western Ghats are increasingly being impacted by the erratic pattern of rainfall.

“There is a significant increase in enquiries for our irrigation systems this year,” said KB Patil, Vice-President, Jain Irrigation Systems. About 85 coffee growers have already implemented drip irrigation on about 190 hectares in Karnataka.

Patil further added that the automation of irrigation and fertigation was becoming popular among growers, who are also battling increasing wage costs.

“Automating the irrigation system not only reduces the water usage, but also reduces manpower costs while increasing the effectiveness of fertiliser application,” said Rohit Easwaran, a fourth generation planter in Somvarpet in Kodagu, who has implemented Jain’s irrigation solution on about 20 hectares.

Patil said the cost of implementing the automated fertigation systems hovers around ₹60,000 per acre for coffee as against ₹40,000 for banana or pomegranate, mainly due to the undulating terrain on which coffee cultivation is practised.

However, the payback time is around two years, he added.

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