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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Bullish turn: The return of the bullock to India’s farms -Shagun

Bullish turn: The return of the bullock to India’s farms -Shagun

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published Published on Mar 4, 2022   modified Modified on Mar 5, 2022

-Down to Earth

Post mechanisation, for the first time there is innovation in farm equipment to revive bullocks and aid small farmers

Simhachalam calls himself a ‘bullock entrepreneur’. Each agricultural season, this farmer from Andhra Pradesh’s Sangra village travels with his pair of bullocks to work on other people’s farms in nearby villages for a fee.

Like most other parts of the country, bullocks in these tribal villages are traditionally used only for ploughing and transportation. But Simhachalam uses his bullocks for weeding and sowing.

“I learnt how to use a bullock-mounted weeding implement at a training programme in 2018. Today, I carry out weeding in at least 150 other farms,” says the 32-year-old, adding that he charges Rs 750 for weeding 1 ha.

“The job takes me six hours, while manual weeding takes two days and the labour cost is around Rs 1,600 for a farm of that size,” he says. In June 2021, Simhachalam attended another training programme on using bullocks for sowing.

“I used an instrument called vithinigalla, essentially a seed pipe, and finished sowing on my 1 ha farm in under an hour. Many farmers from the Gram Panchayat came to see the process,” he says. Eight other farmers in his Gram Panchayat have now started using their bullocks for sowing.

What Simhachalam is doing is a departure from the overall trend in the farm sector, where tractors and other machines have progressively replaced bullocks.

ML Sanyasi Rao, programme manager, Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN), a non-profit that organised the sowing training using bullocks, says, “Almost every farm household in the region owns bullocks. We are trying to promote their use in farming as it makes economic and logistical sense for small farmers.”

Besides Visakhapatnam, WASSAN is popularising the use of bullocks in three other Andhra Pradesh districts—Srikakulam, East Godavari and Vizianagaram.

In 1961, draught animals, more than 90 per cent of which were bullocks, met 71 per cent of a farm’s energy requirement, shows an estimate by the Rural Technology Action Group of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.

By 1991, the number came down to 23.3 per cent. The reduced usage resulted in a steady decline in bullock population. According to the latest livestock census, India has over 30 million bullocks employed as draught animals, which is almost half the number used in 1997.

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Down to Earth, 4 March, 2022, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/agriculture/bullish-turn-the-return-of-the-bullock-to-india-s-farms-81805


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