Chennai: Padma Shri Subhash Palekar promises wealth to farmers, health for all
Chennai: Zero Budget Natural Farming alone can deliver the Government's target of doubling the farm output, presently estimated at about 273 million tones, to meet the growing food needs of the 1.34 billion people, celebrated alternate system farming exponent Subhash Palekar said here Friday.
“This system will ensure wealth for the farmer and health for all; it will ensure there will be no more farmer committing suicide due to failed crop and mounted debts”, Palekar told reporters at the end of his two-day trip to Tamil Nadu when he addressed farmers' workshops in Tirukkalikundram and Kancheepuram. Many students and IT professionals attended the workshops, along with hundreds of farmers from across the state, to learn about Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF).
Padma Shri Subhash Palekar, hailing from the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, is a much celebrated name in the farming sector in the north and more recently in the neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. His has been campaigning for natural-spiritual farming as an alternate to the chemical-industrial model of agriculture brought into India by the Government as the Green Revolution, which he accuses of bringing only misery for the farmer while failing on the hunger front. “Also, the government now is accepting that the agricultural universities are not delivering solutions”, he said at his Chennai press conference.
Convinced by his ZBNF, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu appointed Palekar this June as his adviser in the agriculture sector and allocated Rs 100 crore to promote the system in the state. “Work has already begun in Kakinada and several other places in AP, with large number of farmers attending ZBNF workshops and beginning to replicate the system in their fields. We are confident of converting the entire AP farm sector into ZBNF in three years”, Palekar said.
Explaining his concept, he said the ZBNF farmer would not require to spend any money on his field as the humus (the dark organic material in soils, produced by the decomposition of vegetable or animal matter essential to the fertility of the earth) is created by the waste from the farm output and only about ten per cent of water is required for the irrigation as the earth takes moisture from the atmosphere.
“The farmer starts earning from the very first year and the outputs per acre will be double and more”, Palekar said, quoting various studies that proved the efficacy of the system. He said he was looking forward to introducing ZBNF to the Tamil Nadu farmers in a big way and hoped that the state government would back the efforts, just as the neighbouring AP has done.
