ISRO pilot study to help frame policy on fodder, wastelands

[related-post]

“The idea behind the project is that the data generated could help use available fodder optimally. We can also estimate the availability of fodder well in advance to help make better plans in case of shortage. The pilot study was successful and it will now be scaled at state and then national level,” said NDDB chairman T Nanda Kumar.

Banaskantha was chosen for the pilot study as the farmers in the district, situated on Rajasthan border, depend on livestock and dairy for living. The district, marred by large number of cases of poverty and large-scale migration due to drought, was found to have 81,000 hectare land under green fodder and 57,000 hectare of cultivable wasteland.

The study also points out that at least 35 percent of villages in the district have more than 5 percent wasteland that could be developed to grow fodder. “At macro level, the fodder availability problem does not appear that large, but at micro- level, i.e at the state level, the problem varies geographically. For instance, states such as Gujarat and Rajasthan will fall far short of the (fodder) requirement while Punjab will have better availability,” the NDDB chairman added.

According to Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), there was a green fodder shortage of 206 million tonnes in the country. This shortage could rise to 400 million tonnes by 2025.

Apart from remote sensing study, the exercise involved field surveys that were carried out three times, with the team members visiting 69 villages to verify fodder-growing areas. The geographic position of the areas was recorded using hand-held GPS systems.

The data will be further fed into an internet-based dairy geographical information system (i-DGIS), which has been developed by the NDDB to identify villages by integrating details such as human census, livestock census, and land use of those villages to help stakeholders monitor and plan dairy development at village level.

ISRO’s SAC has been working on national-level forecasting of seasonal crop sowing pattern for the government through its Forecasting Agricultural Output Using Space, Agro, Meteorological & Land-Based Observation (FASAL) project using the same remote sensing technique.

The current project is an extension of this technique even though it was more of a challenge as reading fodder pattern using satellites is not that easy. Fodder crops are grown by small and marginal farmers in small patches of land and are generally mixed with regular crops, which posed the challenge of differentiating these crops through remote sensing, a project report prepared jointly by the ISRO and NDDB states.