-The New Indian Express HYDERABAD: To preserve indigenous seed varieties and also promote organic farming, the state bio-diversity board will soon open over 110 seed banks across the two states. With the requisite budgets sanctioned for this pilot project, the board is all set to start the programme in the coming weeks. The concept is inspired by the activities of a Karnataka-based NGO which was able to do the same in a...

-The Tribune The community has to pay the cost of environmental degradation if sustainable agricultural practices are not followed. Food can also be produced by in-built provisions for ecological services. For this, sustainability issues have to be addressed with policy support. An ecosystem is a dynamic, complex, functional unit of diverse living organisms, physical environment and humans are its integral part. The wellbeing of mankind depends upon food, water, fibre, medicine, flood...

-Economic and Political Weekly     Sustained and focused efforts have to be made by the Tamil Nadu state government to provide relief and rehabilitation to the drought affected people of the state. S Rajendran (myrajendran@gmail.com) is with the Department of Economics, Periyar University, Salem, Tamil Nadu. Due to the failure of the north-east monsoon in December 2013, Tamil Nadu is witnessing drought like conditions this year, leading to poor agricultural productivity, rural distress,...

-The Hindu Among various types of agriculture, dairy farming is often considered to be quite remunerative. Almost all veterinary institutes in the country keep harping on the relatively high income that a dairy unit can generate for a farmer. "But what they often fail to emphasise is that cattle rearing alone is not profitable. In fact merely having some milch cattle would prove disastrous for a farmer since the animals need green...

-The Tribune   Jind: There's a novel experiment underway in an acre-and-a-half at Jind's Nidana village. A group of farmers, most of them illiterate, are out to prove a point to scientists and experts: agriculture is possible without pesticides and more profitable than with the use of pesticides. Scientists of the Delhi-based National Centre for Integrated Pest Management New Delhi (NCIPM), with the help of the state Agriculture Department, have taken an acre-and-a-half...