PILLARS OF INDIAN ECONOMY IN COVID-19: COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF FARMING & AGRO BASED INDUSTRY

The country was under lockdown from more than two months due to COVID-19. In this crisis, the farmers have not allowed food security to be endangered. Moreover, they have increased food production despite all the obstacles. Right now, farmers are facing many obvious and climatic problems. Prime Minister of India has said that we have to convert this crisis into opportunity. The solution to farmer’s problems is necessary, to make the country Atmanirbhar Bharat and to take it rapid fast on the path of progress. The outbreak of this epidemic has come at a time when the harvesting of Rabi crops had already started. However, taking necessary steps, Ministry of Agriculture has worked with all agencies of selling and buying agricultural products, units notified by the state governments, farmers and agricultural labourers along with machines used in harvesting and sowing and agro-horticulture exempted from and out of state. In addition, the All India Transport Call Centre was launched to remove bottlenecks in the movement of seeds, pesticides, fertilizers and fruits, vegetables, milk, eggs, fish and other perishable agricultural products

COVID -19 Pandemic: A Review Article

Corona virus infection is caused by a virus of COVID- 19 strain. this infection is spread by close contact with infected person and mainly due to droplets, this virus may remain alive on surfaces which was touched by an infected person .so to stop its spread it was necessary to reduce human contact, for that all countries around the world including India declared complete of all places where mass people gatherings were happens. WHO announced Covid- 19 infection as a global pandemic and this was a global emergency required complete lockdown. This necessary lockdown was for stoppage of infection spread but it also impacted very badly on every individual’s lifestyle. Conclusion: PHC are the easily assessable and cost friendly for rural peoples but during this pandemic situation these PHC are not prepared for facing COVID -19 pandemic. Due to less accessibility to media and less media coverage exact situation in rural areas was not stated properly also less knowledge in rural peoples about COVID -19 infection was reason of high risk of spread of infection amongst them. Children in rural areas who are economically not that much well can’t get access to internet and cannot afford the mobile or laptops for online education this made the chances of drop outs in these children. During lockdown due to pandemic all the farmers and small shop holders faced huge loss ,this was the period of great earnings from various rabi crops but due to shortage of labor and non-availability of various machineries delay harvest and this lead to huge loss for farmers.

Occurrence of hail storms and strategies to minimize its effect on crops

Among the extreme weather events hailstorm in recent past caused significant crop damage across the country. In 2014 and 2015 unseasonal rains and hailstorms during March and April damaged rabi crops as well as horticultural crops extensively in many parts of the country. In this paper, a detailed analysis of occurrence of hailstorm in four homogenous regions of India during past 35 years from 1981 to 2015 has been made, to find out the climatological and favourable synoptic aspects associated with hailstorms so that timely issuing of warning and Agromet Advisories could minimize the crop damage/loss. Maximum hailstorms were observed to have occurred in Maharashtra (31 years) during the period of study with highest occurrence of 11 days during 24 February to 14 March, 2014. Also Maharashtra is more prone to hailstorms than other States in the country with maximum probability of occurrence (91-95%) while the probability of occurrence (6-10%) is least in Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Meghalaya, Sikkim and Nagaland. The significant synoptic situations associated with occurrence of hailstorms are found to be the north-south line of wind discontinuity causing convective activity and systems in westerlies. The information generated in this study was found to be very useful in minimizing crop loss through operational agromet services launched by the India Meteorological Department/Ministry of Earth Sciences in collaboration with the Agromet Field Units (AMFUs) located at State Agricultural Universities and institutes of ICAR and IITs under the project Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa (GKMS).

Characterisation of rice fallow period for increasing cropping intensity in Khordha district of Odisha

The possibility of increasing the cropping intensity in Khordha district was assessed by block-wise characterisation of rainfall, soil texture, available water holding capacity of soil and district level temperature during the rice fallow period as well as deciding the appropriate sowing window for both kharif and rabi crops. More than 50% chances of occurrence of wet weeks at the beginning of the kharif season (20-22 SMW) indicated that the summer ploughing and initial seed bed preparation could be taken up during the period followed by sowing of rice from 23 SMW. The 42-43 SMW with greater than 30% initial probability of wet week at 20 mm threshold limit. Considering the length of growing period (LGP) available, the adjustment of rice variety duration by 10-15 days in medium land and advancement of pulse sowing almost by 15 days before harvest of the rice crop (Pira crop) in low land was registered as the best su suitable option for rabi pulses to ensure better utilisation of rice fallow. In addition to these, harvesting surplus water during kharif and storing in farm ponds for judicious utilisation during rabi season further enhanced the possibility of utilisation of rice fallow and increasing the cropping intensity. In the event of delayed monsoon the rice duration has to be adjusted accordingly not to sacrifice the designated suitable period for rabi pulses.

Analysis of Weed Growth in Rabi Crop Agriculture Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Weed interference for the duration of crop establishment is a severe difficulty for wheat in North India [22.9734 ° N, 78.6569 ° E]. In situ far-flung detection for precision herbicide application minimizes the danger of both crop damage and herbicide input. This research paper focuses on the comparative study of crop growth and its effect at three different places in Madhya Pradesh [24.5840° N, 81.5020° E] India[20.5937° N, 78.9629° E]. These weed species included Pigweed (Amaranthaceae ), Goosefoot [Chenopodiaceae], Wild oat species (Poaceae), livid amaranth (Amaranthus blitum L.), Fathen[Chenopodiaceae (L.) Wild.], and Bermuda grass (Poaceae L.) a significant weed for rabi crop production in India with sensitivity to clopyralid, is the best available put up broadleaf herbicide. The intention of the Takes a look to assess the accuracy of four different CNNs architectures to locate the weed images of the Rabi crop of the family of various Rabi crops growing in competition with Rabi crops at 3 sites in Madhya Pradesh. Four CNNs have been compared, including object detection-primarily based ResNet-50, image classification-based VGGNet-16, Inception v4 and EfficientNet-B7 the EfficientNet-B7 networks have been trained to hit upon both leaves or canopies Everlasting of weeds. Image classification the use of ResNet-50 and VGGNet-16 was largely unsuccessful all through validation with whole pics (Fl-score < 0.04). CNN training elevated the usage of cropped photographs Eternal Broad Fall detection at some stage invalidation for VGGNet (F1-score = 0.77) and ResNet-50 (F1-Score = 0.62). The rabi crop weed leaf-trained inception V4 and EfficientNet-B7 achieved the highest F1-Score (0.94) and F1 Score (0.96) respectively, The aim of leaf-based EfficientNet-B7 extended false positives, even though such errors could be won over with extra training images for network desensitization training. Photograph-based faraway sensing rabi crop will become the most viable CNN test for weeds in competition with the EfficientNet-B7 crop.

Response of Phosphorus on Growth and Yield of Pearl Millet, Microbial Population and System Productivity in Pearl Millet Based Cropping Systems

The present study evaluated the use of various phosphorus management practices with and without PSB on pearl millet and its residual effect on succeeding pulse crops like green gram, blackgram and chickpea. It was conducted at agricultural college farm, Bapatla during both kharif and rabi seasons of 2017-18 and 2018-19. The treatments consisted of T1: No Phosphorus, T2: 50% RDP T3: 75% RDP, T4: 100% RDP, T5: 50% RDP + seed inoculation with PSB, T6 :75% RDP + seed inoculation with PSB, T7 : 100% RDP + seed inoculation with PSB in RBD design with three replications in kharif pearl millet crop. The results indicated that, the treatment T7 (100% RDP + seed inoculation with PSB) recorded significantly the highest growth parameters like LAI, CGR, RGR and NAR at different phenological stages of crop growth period and yield of pearl millet (2996 kg ha-1 and 2876 kg ha-1 during 2017 and 2018 respectively) and it was at par with T4 (100% RDP). Similarly, the total fungi, bacteria and rhizobium counts were increased with increase in fertilizer level and PSB treated plots (T7, T6 and T5) when compared to un-inoculated PSB plots (T4, T3 and T2). The highest number of bacteria (46.2 and 49.2 cfu per gram soil), fungi (25.4 and 24.4 cfu per gram soil) and rhizobium (33.5 and 34.4cfu per gram soil) was found in the treatment T7 (100% RDP+ seed inoculation with PSB) during 2017-18 and 2018-19, respectively. Among the different kharif residual treatments, the highest pearl millet equivalent yield of rabi crops was recorded with residual effect of 100 % RDP + PSB (M7).

The Response of Consumer Food Price Index (CFPI) due to the Impact of Pandemic COVID-19 on Indian Agriculture Sector

India is an agricultural country and a core source of income for the world population. Indian economy is greatly depending on agriculture that is decrease day by day due to pandemic COVID-19. India is a major exporter of many crop foods. India, Thailand, and Vietnam are the major exports of rice if these stopped exports it reduces the economy up to 15%. A related circumstance is built up with diverse yields too like wheat, sunflower whose fare has been stationary by Kazakhstan, Serbia individually. In India, the end of April is the main source of income to farmers because they sell their rabi crops (wheat, mustard, maize, lentil, chilies, gram, tomatoes) in the market drastically decreases of CFPI may lead to the distress of Indian agricultural economy. The change over time in the price of options on wheat futures reveals increased price volatility in response to growing uncertainty about the COVID-19 impacts.

Deep ploughing in summer will increase kharif yield

Harvesting of rabi crops almost free farmers till the last week of March or the first week of April. At this time there is so much moisture in the field that deep plowing can be done easily. Deep plowing of fields in summer is a profitable deal for the Kharif crop, but it should be done on time. There are more benefits from this. There will be no problem of weeding in the field nor will the crops need more water To make kharif cultivation easier, the agriculture department has released a sowing calendar of kharif crops, informing farmers many tricks of kharif cultivation. Agricultural experts say that summer plowing is most important in the production of kharif crops. Yields can increase by up to 50 per cent if plowed in a fixed period.