Tamil Nadu: Memorandum of Understanding for safer pest control tech

Coimbatore: The farming community in Tamil Nadu is well geared towards shifting away from the use of chemical pesticides thereby making the farming systems more sustainable and ensuring that the crop produces is safe to the consumers. They are also aware of the profitability of market oriented cultivation, especially for growing of horticultural crops which require use of safer pest control products and practices.

Organic farming is also gaining importance as an alternative means of sustaining the natural resources at farm level. In this context, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) is undertaking multi-dimensional R & D towards evolving more of eco-friendly and consumer safe pest control technologies for adoption by farmers.

Towards augmenting the impact of these initiatives, TNAU has also invited collaboration in eco-friendly pest management R & D with Sun-Agro Biotech Research Centre (SABRC) which is an autonomous scientific society, recognised by department of scientific and industrial research (DSIR), Government of India, which is also focused on R & D of eco-friendly crop protection technologies like bio pesticides, bio control agents and insect trapping systems, besides environment impact assessment, with internationally experienced experts as scientific faculty.

This collaboration agreement was renewed by the signing of fresh MoU for the next three-year period with the registrar, Dr C. R. Anandakumar representing TNAU and Dr S. Sithanantham representing SABRC.

This R & D collaboration has now completed three years and has resulted in several promising leads towards evolving safer and widely adoptable eco-safe pest management technologies. These include extended shelf life of the bio-control agent Trichogramma, enhanced potency of botanical bio-pesticides based on sweet flag, more efficient trap designs and pheromone and lure dispensers for attracting important pests like fruit flies and crop borers.