Three villages say no to stubble burning
Farmers of Bhoewali, Kiampur and Rajjian villages in Amritsar district are leading the way by using the straw to fertilise the soil, an innovation that doesn’t cause pollution, helps save money and increases wheat yield
AMRITSAR: Over the past few years as pollution levels have been reaching ‘critical’ levels, choking many cities in north India because of stubble burning, farmers of six villages in Punjab have been setting examples for others of their ilk to follow. They are putting the stubble of the wheat crop after harvesting to good use and not burning it.
Bhoewali, Kiampur and Rajjian of Ajnala tehsil in Amritsar are among the six villages adopted by Punjab agriculture department for development as model villages. The other three villages are Uppli, Tungaan and Kanoi in Sangrur district.
Bhoewali, with 564 farmers owning 801 acres of farmland; Kiampur with 819 farmers holding 1,235 acres and Rajjian with 86 farmers owning 564 acres are not setting their fields afire. Instead, they are mixing the stubble with soil to make their fields “more fertile.”
Research fellow Navjot Singh and ‘demonstrators’ Jagdeep Singh and Gurinder Singh are part of the team handling the Punjab Agricultural Management & Extension Training Institute (PAMETI) project under the agriculture department. The three men are working in the villages, going from door to door, urging the farmers to adopt the novel method to use up stubble.
As a number of bigger villages in the area stubbornly burn their stubble, the farmers of the three villages are now determined to “not play with fire,” says Jagdeep.
Apart from the pollution it causes, stubble burning leads to a sharp drop in soil fertility levels, destroying the nutrient-rich topsoil
and crop-friendly insects. “A huge amount of fertilizers are then needed for the soil, which can cause a dent in the farmers’ income and yield. But if we shun the practice of burning the fields and mix the crop residue with the soil, it makes the land fertile and also eliminates the need for fertilisers. After mixing up the stubble in the soil for two to three years the farmers will not need any kind of fertiliser for the soil,” he says. The agriculture department had started the initiative around three months back and since then the team has had plenty to do and is happy implementing “This good initiative, a model which will be implemented in the entire state,” adds Jagdeep.
The department has also opened three centres, one each in the three villages, to provide agriculture machinery to farmers to “manage” the stubble at a nominal rent. “Small and marginal farmers can easily afford it,” the team members say.
A progressive farmer of Rajjian village and owners of 22 acres of land, Baldev Singh talks about adopting the new practice. After harvesting paddy last year, he mixed the stubble with the soil and the wheat yield increased by three quintal per acre this year. “Before sowing wheat, I used just two bags of urea fertiliser per acre while earlier I had been using three bags when I used to burn the stubble,” he says
Not burning stubble for the last two years, Baldev Singh says he’s happy to note that “Everyone in his village avoided burning stubble this year, thanks to the agriculture department, whose officials kept talking to the farmers and making announcements through speakers of the village’s gurdwara to not burn stubble.”
Chief agriculture officer (CAO) Amritsar Dr Dalbir Singh Chhina said the department had provided seeds and farm equipment free of cost to the farmers. “Those who are not burning stubble are actually increasing their income by ₹10,000 to ₹11,000 per acre,” he says.
MIXING STUBBLE WITH SOIL
The farmers of Bhoewali, Kiampur and Rajjian use disc harrow, a farm implement, to chop up the stubble and mix it with the soil. Once that’s done the field is flooded with water. “As the sowing of paddy will start from June 20, the farmers have enough time to allow the stubble to decompose and mix with the soil,”explains Jagdeep.