Prof Dr Trilochan Mohapatra, secretary of DARE & Director General of ICAR was speaking at inauguration of Farmers’ Science Congress in Bengluru.
By Our Correspondent
Bengaluru, Jan 6:
The 107th Indian Science Congress (ISC) being held at Bengaluru is unique in a sense that 106 years since its inception for the first time Farmers’ Science Congress (FSC) has been organized as its part.
“It is a good move and if continues to the part of ISC from next year, it will be a big encouragement for farming community,” said Prof Dr Trilochan Mohapatra, secretary, Department of Agriculture Research and Education (DARE) and Director General, Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) in an inaugural function the FSC. Later he interacted with media also.
“As farmer innovators, scientists and policy makers are coming together at the FSC it will provide opportunity to innovators from different areas to learn from each other. Scientists’ innovators interaction will provide opportunity for scaling up the innovations. Government taking note of the problems in innovations at the FSC will help in finding ways and means to solve these problems”, Prof Dr T. Mohapatra said while talking to media.
Earlier, speaking to AgroSpecrum, Prof Dr T. Mohapatra said that DARE is setting up innovation center in Delhi where farmers would work on their innovative ideas. It would also validate farmers’ innovations, scale them up, encourage, promote and propagate. This would start functioning in a year’s time. Along with that Farmers’ Innovation Fund was also being set up to help innovative farmers if they fall short of some resources somewhere. Besides this, several farm innovations have already been validated and documented.
He also elaborated on ‘Attracting and Retaining Youth in Agriculture’ (ARYA) scheme. Rural bio economy is a major strength. There are already 104 successful agri startups and 215 agro processing center. This would attract youths to agriculture, he said. Farmers need not think about agriculture only from the food angle, they could bring out many value added products.
Prof Dr Trilochan Mohaparta also elaborated on Integrative Farming System (IFS) models. Over 50 such models were validated and working on ground. They are operating in different agro climatic zones, different agro economic areas. They have been developed as per local requirements and situations. Three basic aims were improving farmers’ income livelihood security and sustainability. These models were of horticulture, fisheries, cut flowers, mushrooms, animal husbandry, intercropping and many more things.
He stressed the importance of science in agriculture and said agriculture is not an art as many people feel like but it is science and economics which are the underlining factors.
General President of ISC Prof Rangappa said ISC was giving importance to multi-disciplinary research. He assured that as suggested by Prof Mahapatra he will do efforts to include even social science to make a part of ISC from the next year.
