Awareness Campaign on Agriculture and Environment: The Citizen Face on 26-11-2021 at KVK, Wyra

The undeniable fact is that agriculture is the source of the world's food supply. No matter where or what you are eating, the ingredients in each of our meals comes sources related to agriculture or its allied sectors and all roads lead to agriculture. But the same agriculture feeding us contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change directly through agricultural activities. These gases have a significantly higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. Also, the conventional agricultural practices cause increased greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, water pollution that can threaten human health along with overall climate can make it more difficult to grow crops, raise animals and catch fish than we have done in the past. The ever-growing population is placing burden on agriculture and the resulting expansion through conversion of forests, grasslands and other carbon 'sinks' into cropland or pasture is also increasing the carbon dioxide emissions. Further, the recent advances have helped in improvement of fertilizer use efficiency, develop new rice varieties that emit less methane along with alternatives to conventional manual transplanting of rice, improved management of livestock waste and restoration of degraded lands. In this context, KVK, Wyra organised an awareness campaign on “Agriculture and Environment: The Citizen face” on 26.11.2021 and was participated by scientists of KVK Wyra, 20 farmers and farm women p lus 16 students. Dr. Jessie Suneetha. W and Dr. V. Chaitanya spoke on the need to adopt environment friendly agricultural practices. The participants were shown exhibits that are helping in reducing food and water wastage with efficient use of fertilisers in tomato and maize. Trellis method in tomato is helping in reducing crop wastage as the fruits are not in contact with soil before harvesting and paired row in maize is helping to improve the nutrient management and obtain higher yields.Also, HDPS method of planting in cotton, direct seeded rice (wet) method and use of yellow and blue sticky traps in chilli to overcome the trips menace presently observed extensively in chilli crop were demonstrated in the farm fields of KVK. Constitution Day also known as Samvidhan Divas is celebrated on 26th November every year to commemorate the adoption of the Constitution of India on 26.11.1949 by the Constituent Assembly of India and came into effect on 26.01.1950. The staff and students have read the preamble of the Constitution.