HYderabad: While earlier two crops were grown along with a third crop of green vegetables at times, the first two essentially being rice and maize — the interest in rice is dwindling fast in districts where farmers are dependent on bore-wells, mostly in Telangana districts.
However, even as some rice cultivation areas might be lost to other crops, scientists say that it will not affect the overall rice production.
“Wherever there is less water supply, we suggest farmers to go for dry crops; but paddy has lesser risks and is easy to cultivate and hence in case of adequate water supply, farmers still prefer paddy.
In the last two years, there was more production of cotton due to reduced water supply. The overall production of paddy was not affected and is not likely to be affected much as we have developed very high yielding varieties of rice, and currently 70 per cent of the rice cultivation is under the high yielding varieties,” said principal scientist (Rice), ANGRAU (Acharya NG Ranga Agricultural University), Dr Suryanarayana.
