Ananta Planter
Due to mechanization, tractors have replaced the traditional drought animals used earlier for farm operations. In every village, 5 or 6 big farmers own tractors and hire them to other farmers. Hence, small & marginal farmers, who form a large chunk, compete with big farmers to hire tractor drawn planters in order to complete sowing before the short lived soil moisture dries up. However, the tractor owners prefer to hire them to big farmers. The traditional planters available in the village are not very efficient and are not able to meet the urgent demand of sowing in the villages.
Ananta Planter is a new equipment designed by local Agriculture Research Station. It is 4 times more efficient than traditional planters, hence very helpful in low rain fall conditions in which the soil moisture dries up very quickly in just 2 or 3 days only. But the Ananta Planter was originally designed for sowing only groundnut. So, AF improved the Ananta Planter design to sow millets and pulses as well and it was successfully tested on the farmers’ fields during the previous year.
Watering furrows & manual sowing technique
AF introduced this technique last year on a very small scale for establishing lesser plant density crops like castor and red gram. A water tanker of 5,000 litres capacity is required for sowing castor and red gram on one acre of land. Shallow plough furrows were opened every 6 feet and seeds were manually dibbled in the furrows. Water drawn from outside in a tanker was let in the furrows using pipes and the furrows were closed with a plank. The method was demonstrated on 46 ha of land belonging to 100 rain-fed farmers in the project area. This method works well provided it rains within 20 days after sowing. However, the efforts did not yield the anticipated results this year as the dry spells lasted for more than 50 days after sowing. Providing protective irrigation right from germination to growth stage was not possible because of water scarcity and also made it economically unviable. The experience of previous year revealed that this technique is viable when the dry spell does not exceed 20 days. AF has been trying to work out possible improvements on its research farm for the next kharif season.
Providing protective irrigation during prolonged dry spells
During the last year kharif season AF scaled up demonstration of protective irrigation to red gram crop on 375 ha of land belonging to 900 farmers using tractor drawn tankers. An average yield increase of 30% was observed. AF also succeeded in proving that cement lined farm ponds store water, stop seepage and are of great help for protective watering of tree crops during dry spells. These results encouraged AF to continue popularising these techniques not only among farmers but also all stakeholders including NGOs, research bodies, policy makers, and government officials etc.