Organises live harvest demonstration at Rikadia Village, in Amreli, Gujarat
UPL has delivered promising results with its ProNutiva Sada Samrudh Groundnut programme in Gujarat. UPL recently organised a live harvest demonstration at Rikadia Village, in Amreli that was attended by over 750 farmers, Village Sarpanchs, and agriculture department officials.
The first pilot programme was implemented with 8,500 farmers, which was taken up in the year 2020 in the key groundnut belts in Gujarat which helped double their yields and income, now it has covered over 2.5 lakh acres of farm-land over 50,000 farmers. The overall increase in groundnut yield is 50-60 per cent, with an increase in oil extraction of 1 per cent. In addition, it led to an increase of fodder yield of 35 per cent, which helped improve the farmers’ dairy income.
Under the ambit of the Pronutiva Sada Samrudh project, groundnut farmers were offered integrated agricultural services like IPM Kits, soil testing, weather services, crop advisory and high-tech enabled farmer mechanisation services to increase groundnut yield and income. The farmers used UPL’s product ’ZEBA’, which absorbs water and nutrients and releases it to the plant when it’s needed by the plant.
The programme has been surveyed by We Governance Knowledge Services, Junagarh Agriculture University as well as Grant Thornton, all independent third parties.
The results of the We Governance Knowledge Services showed that with the use of ZEBA and all the other services under the programme, the number of healthy plants increased by 20 per cent, the number of peg formations increased by 25 per cent, the number of pod count increased by 35 per cent and all of these improvements lead to a higher pod weight by 51 per cent. The study by Junagarh Agriculture University indicated an increase in oil of 1.45 per cent, an increase in the true protein of the nuts by 1.68 per cent and an increase in the total carbohydrates of 0.72 per cent. A study is still under process by Grant Thornton and the report will be available soon.
