-The Hindu Business Line Crop gets Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 1 lakh per quintal Jaipur: As part of its crop diversification efforts, Rajasthan will encourage over 50,000 farmers to take up cultivation of super foodgrain quinoa this year, said State Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Minister Prabhu Lal Saini. Rajasthan State Seeds Corporation, which engaged some farmers to grow quinoa seeds on an experimental basis, has managed to raise over 20,000 quintals of seed...

-Frontline Low prices following a bumper crop and the State government’s inability to procure much of the yield leave tur farmers in Maharashtra in a quandary. DROUGHT or abundance, farmers seem to be perpetually doomed in Maharashtra. The most recent crisis unfolding in the agrarian segment is the crashing prices of pulses, particularly tur dal, and the inability of the State government to procure the entire crop. Adding to the problem...

-Livemint.com All our solutions in agriculture, besides management issues, are going to come from science and technology, says Deepak Pental, innovator of GM mustard Last week, the environment ministry’s regulator, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), cleared the commercial release of genetically modified (GM) mustard, leaving it to the government to take a final call. If approved, it will be India’s first food crop developed using transgenic technology, 15 years after Bt...

-Livemint.com While one estimate pegged Maharashtra’s tur production at 1.17 million tonnes, another forecast a record yield of 2.35 million tonnes Mumbai: Maharashtra’s economic survey of 2016-17, which came out on 17 March, pegged the state’s total tur (pigeon pea) yield at 1.17 million tonnes, based on estimates of the Pune-based agriculture commissionerate. A fortnight later, the state’s agriculture department put out revised estimates showing the March projection of tur yield...

-Hindustan Times A report on sugar price policy for 2015-16 by union agriculture ministry had highlighted that Maharashtra’s sugarcane cultivation, which is less than 4% of the total cropped area, consumes 70% of water needed for irrigation Following criticism over sugarcane crop guzzling potable water, particularly in drought-prone Marathwada, the state government is set to introduce a policy for shifting 50% of sugarcane farming on drip irrigation in the next two years. Statistics...