Our first IHP visit was to Satara in May 2018. We interacted with various farmers growning various crops in fields as well as green houses. The major crops grown in the region are:
•Sugarcane •Tomato •Cucumber •Chili •Jalapeno •Ginger •Potato •Banana •Soybean •Cabbage •Cauliflower
Interview of multiple farmers revealed the following issues: Insecticides or pesticides or herbicides are used by farmers as curative measures.
Very few are used for preventive measures, which has resulted in huge loss of crops due to diseases every year in India. Moreover, extensive use of BT crops has resulted in drastic reduction in the yields of various crops.
According to Mahesh Jadhav, a long time farmer from Bhatmali, yield of cucumber in the year 2018 year has reduced from 4 ton to 500 kg because of use of BT seeds.
Another issue faced by farmers is that there are lots of bogus companies that provide the medicine for crops, whose contents they are not assured of. (78% Humic acid may not exactly contain 78% and there is paucity of labs which can test such contents.) hence customer cannot be assured of the quality of fertilizers.
But illiterate farmer still buys from such companies as the rates of such fertilizers and medicine are very less compared to what the reputed companies such as IFFCO, KRUBHCO, DuPont, Dow offer.
Our project, with the help of synthetic biology eliminates the need of fertilizer by inducing System Acquired Resistence of each plant with the help of specific molecules like Jasmonic acid, salicylic acid etc.
