Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu has called for structural changes in agriculture to make it remunerative for farmers. “We should make efforts to make agriculture attractive for the youth. They will be encouraged to take up farming if we can make it a profitable business,” he said.

Addressing the inaugural of the two-day Agrivision-2019 here on Thursday, he said the focus should be on the entire value chain of agriculture — marketing, storage and transportation.

The conference is being organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry and Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University (PJTSAU) and Cornell University.

V Praveen Rao, Vice-Chancellor of the PJTSAU, said there was a need for crop diversification, increasing farm yields and access to irrigation facilities to double farmers’ income.

“In order to achieve these, we should develop qualified human resources to adopt technological changes in agriculture,” he said.

“Integrating short-term, medium-term and long-term crops is crucial. A combination of precision agriculture and Internet of Things will help to scale up agriculture produce,” said TR Kesavan, Chief Operating Officer and President, TAFE.

Sameer Goel, Managing Director of Coromandel International, said the primary sector faced challenges such as low penetration and usage of high-tech agriculture inputs, access to formal credit, low crop yields, huge wastage of agriculture produce, and lack of access to markets.

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