-The Indian Express The dairies are blaming the current situation on the crash in international skimmed milk powder (SMP) prices Puntamba (Maharashtra): Since early September, Nitin Dhanvate’s dairy farm business has gone for a toss. Till around then, the 33-year-old from this village in Ahmednagar district’s Rahata taluka was receiving Rs 28 per litre for the milk containing 3.5 per cent fat and 8.5 per cent SNF (solids-not-fat) he was supplying to...

-The Financial Express How can the cotton and soybean farmers of Vidarbha and Marathwada supplement their incomes so they can get out of the trap of debt and self-engineered death? That was the theme of Union minister Nitin Gadkari’s ninth edition, four-day agricultural exhibition at Nagpur, called Agrovision, to which I was invited.  A promising beginning has been made. In October last year, the National Dairy Development Board commenced operations. It...

-The Indian Express As Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath hits the road for civic polls, The Indian Express travels across the state to track the change he’s brought. Lucknow: Barely 500 m from the half-samadhi half-mazaar that is the monument to poet Kabir, Mohammad Asad tells a story about the growing number of abandoned cattle in the Maghar kasba of Sant Kabir Nagar in eastern Uttar Pradesh. “A truck comes here at...

-The Hindu Business Line Market rates have fallen below MSP levels due to demonetisation hangover, poor offtake Bengaluru: The Narendra Modi government is finding it hard to live up to its promise of doubling farm incomes by 2022 given the challenge it faces in addressing the unremunerative prices of farm produce. The kharif harvest began a little over a month ago, and already the prices of a majority of the crops have slipped...

-The Financial Express For most consumers, ‘organic’ is probably a code for ‘safe’ or ‘residue-free’, not necessarily produce grown without chemical fertilisers and pesticides. But marketers use the tag to tap into a seam of fear in some urban parents who are so anxious about health that they are willing to pay for advertising that spells ‘well-being’. A brand of ‘organic’ jaggery, for example, on the shelves of Reliance Fresh stores...