-Livemint.com Large dairy farms are critical for the next stage of India's white revolution Nagara (Anand): Sunil Patel hardly looks like a dairy farmer in his loafers, sleek glasses and cotton trousers. As he guides me to his farm of 110 cows through the narrow lanes of Nagara, a small village around 60 km from India’s milk capital, Anand, I notice most of the houses have piped natural gas connections. Nagara, like...

-Down to Earth In the run up to World Food Day on October 16, a Food and Agriculture Organization report focuses on the role of social protection in breaking the cycle of rural poverty The Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) annual report on the State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) 2015 explores the potential of social protection programmes in developing countries to tackle hunger and poverty. What is social protection? Social protection programmes...

-Outlook Scientist and longtime activist against genetically modified BT seeds, Dr. Vandana Shiva, talks about why BT has a devastating fallout. A sudden pest attack has ruined cotton crops in large parts of Punjab, bringing biotech, or BT Cotton back into focus. Farmers who used bio-fertilisers in the Malwa region of the state are said to be safe from this latest pestilence. But those growing BT cotton have lost everything. There...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: It is well-known that vegetables sold in major cities contain pesticides, but it has now emerged that these harmful chemicals are present in alarmingly high doses in greens across the country. A report by the agriculture ministry showed that there has been an almost two-fold increase in the number of samples having pesticides above the permitted maximum residue level (MRL) in vegetables, fruits, meat and spices...

-The Hindu YADGIR (Karnataka): It looks like Narasappa Kotriki has pulled a rabbit out of his hat. The marginal farmer from Tipadampalli village in Yadgir district, who suffered crop loss, has found rearing rabbits quite profitable. When he fell into bad times, he purchased 100 rabbits (70 male and 30 female) with Rs 1.2 lakh. He spent another Rs. 2.8 lakh for other infrastructure — cages for the rabbits and a shed...