-The Indian Express Gauraksha is fine, but who will protect our crop from stray cattle, ask farmers. Jhanshi: With Rs 1.5 lakh, a farmer can buy three Holstein Friesian crossbred cows, each giving 4,000 litres or more of milk annually. But Rs 1.5 lakh is roughly what Bhupendra Patel has spent on fencing his 10-acre farm at Dhawari village in Jhansi district’s Tahrauli tehsil. The seven-feet-high barbed-wire enclosure is only to prevent...

-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...

-Scroll.in With reports of abandoned cows destroying crops, the state’s cow protection panel has proposed penalties on owners who set them free. The Bharatiya Janata Party is scrambling to contain the fallout of its efforts to prevent the slaughter of cows, which have distorted rural economies in unforeseen ways. To deal with one unexpected consequence, a Madhya Pradesh government panel has now recommended penalties for farmers who abandon their cattle. This highlights...

-Livemint.com In India, 9 million people left farming between 2001 and 2011 largely due to distress, not because industry invited them, says Shyam Khadka, India’s representative at the FAO Shyam Khadka, India’s representative at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, says more Indians are moving out of agriculture due to distress and not because the manufacturing sector is inviting them. In an interview, Khadka calls for converting food...