From Conventional to modern Agriculture ; A Success Story

One of the farmers namely Shabir Ahmad Khanday resident of village Utikoo Tehsil Karhama District Baramulla was sadly looking at his vast farm dissatisfied .The major reason for this discontentment was the meagre returns from his farm after long strenous hardwork for the entire year.Hardly he could make his ends meet and was disgruntled from farming and was thinking about switching to some other work.

In one of the extension reachouts by department of Agriculture Shabir Ahmad Khanday was mentally prepared to shun the conventional agriculture practices and embrace the technical and modern agriculture practices and give a chance to some cash crops  that too under Organic conditions.The farmer was apprehensive at the beginning but then a pat from agriculture technocrats saw Shabir Ahmad change his farm of seven kanals into Vegetable and a niche crop Of cocks comb.

Team of agriculture technocrats  from sub division Tangmarg stood by the farmer and provided him all the support for establishing an organic brand and less cultivated cocks comb which has a high demand in Jammu and kashmir market.

The farmer was provided sprinkler irrigation rain guns from the department so that the crops receive round the clock irrigational facilities as and when needed.Moreover drip irrigation too was laid to provide the required quantity of water droplets to the crops.

Moreover a borewell on 100% subsidy was provided to the farmer for flood irrigation to the vegetable crops in hot summers.

All the efforts of the farmer and the department started paying dividends when the farmer sold only cocks comb for an amount of eighty thousand in one go.This gave Shabir an impetus to take bigger strides and he dived into organic vegetable cultivation where in he earned six times more revenue as compared to the conventional set up.

This lifted  Shabir economically and since then there has been no looking back.Last year Shabir cultivated summer peas which was a dream previuosly for any farmer and his peas sold like hot cakes in the market fetching an amount 0f eighty rupees per kg.

Shabir previously earned an amount of 30 to 40 k from his farm and in the previous year only his farm fetched him an amount of 2.50 lakh anually thus increasing his income multiple times.