-Livemint.com India’s weather office has forecast a normal monsoon. Bountiful rains in the June-to-September period are critical for about 800 million Indians who depend directly or indirectly on farming New Delhi: Gangabhishan Thaware, a 53-year-old farmer from the drought-prone Marathwada region of Maharashtra, took an unusual step in July last year. Thaware and his fellow villagers had toiled on their fields and spent thousands of rupees on seeds and fertilizers, hopeful...

-The Indian Express The crop in a well-marked plot of this field is, then, harvested, threshed, winnowed and weighed. If the produce contains moisture, it has to be dried first before weighing. Crop cutting experiments (CCE) have traditionally been conducted to obtain reliable average yield rates for estimation of agricultural production. These are mostly done by district/subdivision-level officials from the revenue, economics and statistics or agriculture departments of the concerned state governments....

-Livemint.com For the first time during the tenure of the present government, overall inflation of food articles is negative, implying a decline in prices Last week the India Meteorological Department (IMD) presented its first forecast for the monsoon this year. The forecast at 97% of the long period average (LPA) suggested yet a third year of normal monsoon rains, following 2016 and 2017. This should have ideally brought cheer to farmers struggling...

-Scroll.in A new report says that a crop-neutral direct payout scheme might be better than paying farmers the difference between market price and production cost. Raising minimum support prices to 1.5 times the cost of production could severely distort agricultural markets, suggests a new report from the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations. The report takes a look at government schemes to bolster the crop procurement process. The Centre offers...

-India Water Portal More than 1000 villages of the state are expected to be affected by a severe water crisis. Lokesh Verma, a farmer from Nainital’s Chanfi village, says this is the third year in a row that he is bearing losses in agriculture. “I have lost around Rs 2 lakh and there’s a debt of Rs 70,000 to pay off. I grow strawberries, guavas and peas in my 15 bighas of...