Where the other side is really ‘greener’

: Three months have gone since S. Ranganathan, a long-standing farmer of Mannargudi, visited Beijing and Shanghai to study agricultural practices and systems in that part of China. He is yet to get over his excitement of having seen a ‘wonderland’.

In a five-hour-long train journey between the two Chinese cities over a distance of 1,500 km, the farmer noticed not only high-rise buildings, normally found in and around any major urban centre, but also extensive wheat crops.

Neither human life nor any cattle was visible anywhere. It looked to him that the entire planting of wheat crop must be by mechanical methods, without manual operations and naturally, harvesting must also be by machines. “I saw miles and miles of standing crops, which cannot be either planted or harvested manually,” he recollects.

Mr. Ranganathan’s admiration for China does not end there. His visit to Beijing’s Ecology Science Popularisation Park was quite revealing. Equating it with a rural development community or a commune, he says the Park consists of a housing colony and developed plots for an integrated farming covering animal husbandry, fishery, mini-forestry, horticulture and arrangements for full-fledged crop planning for paddy, wheat, sugarcane, and pulses besides having bio-gas power plants for self-consumption and other needs of the community.

The veteran Mannargudi farmer was one among 20 farmers from different parts of the State who went to China in May, as part of an initiative taken by the Tamil Nadu government to arrange exposure visits to four countries. His regret was that he could not get to discuss various issues with farmers or agricultural scientists of China. A private firm’s representatives had briefed his team.

V. Sathyanarayanan, another farmer hailing from Seruvamamani, near Tiruvarur, and nine other farmers interacted with scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Manila. For him, the IRRI’s lack of emphasis on the System of Rice Intensification, a method being promoted by the authorities in India for better paddy cultivation, was a surprise. Besides, “contrary to the advice rendered to farmers frequently in India, farmers in Philippines do not follow the rotation of crop or provide a considerable gap of time between two crops. They seem to be adopting paddy cultivation throughout the year, without adverse effects.”

Two other groups of farmers went to Thailand and Israel.

C. Chandrasekaran from Palayamkottai, who went to the south-east Asian country, says that even though there does not seem to be extensive farming or very high degree of state support, Thai agriculturists are apparently adept in marketing their produce, a quality which is missing in Indian farmers. “They are skillful in doing value addition to what they produce and package them suitably for international market,” he says.