Chandigarh Punjab and Haryana are bracing up for record cotton crop this season thanks to favourable weather, increase in area under cotton and high returns by cotton growers last year.
New Delhi With heavy rains lashing eastern parts of the country during last few days, the paddy sowing activities are expected to get a boost during next few weeks, a top agricultural scientist said.
Heavy rainfall in West Bengal, Assam and Orissa has resulted in key paddy growing regions starting their sowing operations.
According to the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the eastern an
As kharif sowing begin in irrigated belts of India, farmers are changing the sowing pattern depending on the remunerative prices they got in the previous year.
Trial plans for biotech version of crops like rice, cotton, corn, castor, sorghum and potato could be delayed since a crucial meeting of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) was postponed by a month from scheduled date of June 8.
The meeting was expected to discuss permission of field trials and research for some biotech crops during the coming kharif season.
On the back of reports of a good summer rains and the on-time arrival of monsoon at the Kerala coast, expectations of a good crop has spurred farmers countrywide to sow more acreage especially under commercial crops such as sugarcane and cotton.
Exports of both these crops, ironically, have been controlled in the past several months despite firm global prices: the first, on apprehensions that it
Ban on popular but much-maligned insecticide endosulfan in Kerala and Karnataka due to its alleged health hazards is being seen by some experts as not just unreasonable and unscientific but also as one that could lead farmers to use potentially more dangerous and costlier insecticides, particularly in the cotton belt.
Chlorpyrifos (CPF), a widely used organophosphorus pesticide (OP), is metabolized to CPF-oxon, a potent cholinesterase (ChE) inhibitor, and trichloro-2-pyridinol (TCPy). Urinary TCPy is often used as a biomarker for CPF exposure, whereas blood ChE activity is considered an indicator of CPF toxicity. However, whether these biomarkers are dose related has not been studied extensively in populations with repeated daily OP exposures. The authors sought to determine the relationship between blood ChE and urinary TCPy during repeated occupational exposures to CPF.
Bangalore Karnataka government has chalked out plans to provide irrigation facility for two lakh acre this year in all river basin areas in a bid to increase agricultural output in the state.
The plan is to divert the excess water from the rivers for irrigation.
Even as state governments invest in social welfare measures, they are forced into constant competition with one another to attract private investments, offering a good “investment climate” that includes access to a low cost workforce and a physical infrastructure geared towards capital accumulation. The need to provision welfare within an accumulation regime premised on global competition, fiscal austerity and marketisation, and a simultaneous need to reduce labour costs and to ensure social security, to exclude and include labour appears paradoxical.
An invasive alien weed, silverleaf nightshade, is threatening cotton and wheat crops in Syria and Iraq and could spread to Lebanon and Jordan, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Tuesday.
More than 60 percent of the farmland in Syria, growing mainly cotton and wheat, has been infested with the weed, originally from the American tropics, which sucks nutrients from
