Major step to boost the agriculture sector: DC MK Aravind
By Gaurav Sidhu Khema Kheda
Sri Muktsar Sahib, June 11
Taking a major step to boost the agriculture sector by decreasing the input cost of farming, Agriculture Department has prepared the Soil Fertility Map for all farmlands in District Sri Muktsar Sahib under Mission Tandarust Punjab. This project was aimed at improving soil nutrition and crop production besides checking mindless use of chemical fertilizers.
This was informed by Deputy Commissioner MK Aravind Kumar here on Tuesday. He said that officers of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Department under the Soil Health Card Scheme collected 19,112 soil samples from all the villages of district and prepared the Soil Health Cards accordingly. Thereafter, the data was used to generate Soil Fertility Map using the Global Positioning System (GPS) of land holding of each soil card holder.
While further sharing the detail Chief Agriculture Officer (CAO) Baljinder Singh said that now the exercise is on to install the soil fertility maps block-wise in all 236 villages of 4 blocks in the District. He informed that soil fertility has been checked for eight main nutrients including Organic Carbon, Phosphorus, Potash, Sulphur, Zinc, Iron, Manganese and soil pH. The presence of the nutrients is shown in a colour code with red denoting deficiency, green for abundance and yellow for normal.
CAO informed that the soil fertility maps for every block would be installed at common public places in the villages like Cooperative Societies, Panchayats Ghars, near Gurudwaras etc. so that maximum people reap benefit from them. He said that we aim to install maps in the all the villages before the commencement of paddy transplantation.
It has been observed that unscientific use of fertilizers has adversely affected soil health and crop production as well as burnt hole in the farmers’ pockets. This exercise coupled with the awareness campaign will hopefully yield positive results, said Baljinider Singh.
Agriculture Development Officer Sukhjinder Singh said that department is holding awareness camps in all the villages to motivate the farmers to get benefit of these soil fertility maps. He said that generally farmers use excessive fertilizer as they don’t know the fertility level of their soil but with these map even a layman farmer could understand the availability of nutrients in his soil.
