Vol. 12, Special Issue 7 (2023)

Author(s):
Saket Dubey, SK Verma, Ashish Masih, Rakhi Dubey, Kamal Kant Lodhi and Shivam Mishra

Abstract:
Climate change is one of the major issue affecting agriculture worldwide. Cultivation under controlled or regulated conditions of temperature, light, humidity and other factors which influence crop yield and quality can be termed as protected cultivation. It is a way of mitigating the adversities on crop due to uncertain and varying climatic conditions as a result of climate change. Thus protected cultivation is a means of providing favourable conditions for better plant growth with the aim of enhanced yield of improved quality by creating favourable micro-climate around the plants. These favourable conditions of micro-climate can be achieved by means of polyhouse, shadenet houses, insect proof net houses, low plastic tunnels, plastic mulching etc.astheseinterventionshavepotentialtoenhance the crop productivity to many times which is difficult to achieve in normal open field conditions. However these interventions are undoubtedly are very beneficial for the farming community if used skillfully with proper marketing of produce but the point which goes against the majority of farming community is the higher initial cost associated with the adoption of these protective structures. Thus the introduction of low cost protected Structures between the small and Marginal farmers is a way for enabling the small and Marginal Farmers to take benefits associated with protected cultivation. The KVK Mahasamund has made a poly tunnels for nursery raising of Cabbage, Cauliflower, tomato, Brinjal in September. The erratic rainfall due to climate change during last week of September has damaged the nursery of vegetable crops of most of the farmers but the farmers under demonstration have succeeded in saving their vegetable nursery of above said crops. Also the cultivation of cole crops was also taken inside and outside the Low cost protected structure to study the impact of these protected structures. The marketable yield of cauliflower was found to be 5.47 kg/m2 in protected conditions against of 4.42 kg/m2 in open conditions while in case of cabbage marketable yield was found to be 8.55 kg/m² in protected conditions against of 6.70 kg/m2 in open conditions. The response of small and marginal farmers towards adoption of low-cost structures for protected cultivation was encouraging as the technology adoption was feasible for them.