-Livemint.com Fiscal 2017 marks the fifth straight year when production of horticulture crop surpassed that of foodgrains New Delhi: Latest numbers from the agriculture ministry released on Tuesday showed that production of horticulture crops like fruits and vegetables touched a record high of 295 million tonnes in 2016-17. Apart from being higher than foodgrain production estimated at 273 million tonnes during this period—another record i.e. 2016-17 marks the fifth straight year when...

-Scroll.in Growing the traditional maize and soya bean crops is no longer economically viable. “The land is thirsty, the Korku is hungry,” goes the refrain of the Korku Adivasis in the Satpura forest in Madhya Pradesh’s Khandwa district. An unrelenting drought since 2014 has parched the Korku farmland, driving a population of over 40,000 spread across 100-odd villages to desperation. In Khari village, for example, more than half the farmers have been forced...

-The Pioneer While the Government has done its bit to boost the output of pulses, it has done little to check the nexus between politicians and grain traders For several decades, production of pulses in India has fallen substantially short in terms of consumption. This persistent deficit has led to intermittent bouts of spike in prices as imports (needed to plug it) have often come after lag and have failed to reach...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Five years after sequencing the pigeonpea genome, Indian scientists have identified Madhya Pradesh as the centre of origin of this nationwide staple legume and discovered genes they say will allow the expansion of pigeonpea cultivation. Scientists at the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) near Hyderabad and their collaborators in Australia, China and the US yesterday announced the results of a new study that has traced...

Much to our surprise, a careful relook at the newly released estimates on farm production from the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare would reveal that the foodgrain production during the rabi season is likely to fall by almost 1 million tonne between 2013-14 and 2016-17. Please see chart-1. Amidst the celebration of a bumper harvest in the ongoing crop year, it needs to be explained why the rabi foodgrain output...