By Our Staff Reporter
Dehradun, 18 Jun: A ‘Kisan Goshti’ on ‘Balanced Use of Fertilisers for Sustainable Soil Health Management’ was jointly organised in virtual mode by ICAR-Indian Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Dehradun, and Department of Agriculture, Uttarakhand. About 225 farmers from states like Uttarakhand, J&K, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and 20 scientists and technical staff from ICAR-IISWC, 10 officers from the State Agriculture Department, and 10 students from different Universities participated in the programme. This event was conducted to celebrate 75 years of Indian Independence in a befitting manner.
The programme began with the reading of a message from Dr Trilochan Mohapatra, Secretary, DARE, and DG, ICAR and Dr SK Chaudhari, DDG (NRM), ICAR, MoA&FW, who pointed out the importance of balanced use of fertilisers for sustainable soil health management.
State Agriculture Minister Subodh Uniyal was the Chief Guest. He highlighted the importance of balanced use of fertilisers in conjunction with organic sources for soil health management and getting higher productivity and profitability. He congratulated the Institute for its efforts in this direction. He quoted the example of Israel for its high end agriculture technology like use of drip irrigation. He claimed the State Agriculture Department had made progress in distribution of Soil Health cards under the “Soil Health Mission”, an important effort towards improving soil health. He urged the farmers to adopt diversification of agriculture. He spoke about various schemes of the State Government to improve the condition of farmers.
Dr M Madhu, Director of the Institute, spoke about the rising soil and water degradation problem in India due to imbalanced fertilisation. He recommended that farmers adopt the Integrated Nutrient Management approach in which soil test based fertilisers are judiciously used in combination with available organic manures, bio-fertilisers and other sources of nutrients. Gauri Shankar, Director, Agriculture, Uttarakhand was also present on the occasion. Dr D Mandal, National Fellow, advocated the 4R approach to ascertain judicious use of fertilisers. Dr Gopal Kumar spoke on the Integrated Plant Nutrition System using local available resources.
The vote of thanks was proposed by Dr NK Sharma, Head, SS&A Division, IISWC. The event was conducted and coordinated by Dr DV Singh, Principal Scientist (Soils) of the Institute and Vijay Deorari, Chief Agriculture Officer. Others involved in organising event were Amit Chouhan, Suresh Kumar, Sonu Sharma and Vinod Das.
