Four years back, Nand Lal Dangi was growing just 20 tonne of cucumber a year on his 2-acre land at Maharaj ki Khedi, a remote village in south Rajasthan, before he brought in the soil-less cocopit farming technique.
The new farming technique has quadrupled his farm output to 80 tonnes in a year and zoomed his annual income, the farmer said.
However, there was a time when it was hard for him to even recover labour cost due to crop damage and low produce.
Beside arid and hot climate, the region, around 425 km from Jaipur, is fighting with a common problem of nemetode, the 40 -year-old said.
Nematodes are worm like pests that feed on the root of the plants.
"After facing so much of crop damage I even invested Rs 10 lakh and purchased new soil for my farm but the problem of nemetode did not go. Against my expectations of 40-45 tonne cucumber my yield remained around 10 tonne, rest was damaged due to various reasons from pests to unfavourable weather conditions," Dangi said.
Finally in 2013, the Israeli technique, about which he got to know during a visit to Gujarat, gave him a reason to smile.
The farmer got a breakthrough in Himatnagar municipality in Sabarkantha district of Gujarat where he saw a company called Asian Agro company growing vegetables in cocopits.
Cocopit farming is a soil-less farming used to grow crops in coconut husk.
Dangi, who had never heard the concept of soil-less farming, was so much moved by the technique that he gave up the traditional way of farming in open fields and switched to cocopit farming.
Besides, he moved to polyhouse for plantation of crops and also gave up the traditional way of irrigating the fields through tubewells. He now uses drip irrigation method.
With the new technique of farming, his output has grown four-fold to 80 tonnes on the same area.
"I started producing Turkish cucumber variety Yuskel 53321 Hybrid with the new technique in my polyhouses. My output jumped four-fold and as production has gone up my income has also gone up," Dangi told
(This article has not been edited by Zeebiz editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
07:38 PM IST