Rabi sowing continues to be promising this year with the area under all crops, barring jowar, increasing. Wheat coverage is up by three per cent from the year-ago level, while maize and rice coverage has increased significantly, the latest update from the Agriculture Ministry said.

Though wheat sowing had shown a 25 per cent rise last week, a close perusal of the data shows that this was due to an “update” issue in Uttar Pradesh with the data getting corrected this week.

Pan-India wheat acreage increased to 286.5 lakh hectares (lh) as of Friday from 278.25 lh in the corresponding period a year ago. In Uttar Pradesh, the largest producer of wheat, the sowing was 86.89 lh as of December 15 against 84.26 lh a year ago. However, the area in UP was recorded at 75.91 lh as of December 9 against 55.82 lh a year ago in the weekly crop update. The year-ago sowing as of December 2 was recorded as 55.82 lh.

Heat wave impact

“The year-ago area as of December 9 should have been 73.56 lh and the latest update has taken care of that error,” said a source. However, he downplayed it saying the State is working on achieving the target of 97 lh despite experiencing deficient monsoon this year. Farmers have responded to the government’s efforts and the area has been almost consistently higher by over 2 lh in the weekly update, he said.

Commenting on the overall rabi sowing and crop situation, Agriculture Commissioner P K Singh said the conditions are good everywhere and the early sowing will help farmers to beat temporal heat, if anything crops up later. Weather incidents such as the heat wave that swept across the country in March this year, cannot be predicted as there are several other factors responsible for this apart from climate change, Singh said.

However, pink worm on wheat crop has been reported in Pathankot and some other districts like Gurdaspur, Patiala and SAS Nagar. But an agriculture scientist in Punjab Agriculture University said there is “no serious problem” anywhere and the crop growth is slightly slower compared to last year despite early sowing.

Oilseeds coverage

Higher area in wheat has been reported from Madhya Pradesh (by 4.18 lh), Uttar Pradesh (2.63 lh), and Rajasthan (1.84 lh) while marginally lower acreage has been reported in Punjab and Haryana.

Total sowing area under all rabi crops has increased to 578.10 lh, up 4.7 per cent from 552.28 lh in the corresponding period last year, the Ministry said in the update.

The area under oilseeds has increased to 97.94 lh, which is 8.2 per cent more than 90.51 lh a year ago as acreage of mustard, the main rabi-grown oilseed, has gone up to nearly 90 lh from 83.18 lh.

Among other crops, the area under chana (gram) has jumped 3.1 per cent to 97.9 lh from 94.97 lh, paddy by 13.6 per cent to 12.64 lh from 11.13 lh, maize by 22.7 per cent to 13.47 lh from 10.98 lh and barley by 15.2 per cent to 7.02 lh from 6.09 lh.

comment COMMENT NOW