Stubble burning: This son of soil fighting fires & minting money also

While he started off with the then available farm implements like mulcher and plough, now he has set up a farm machinery bank and has purchased modern machines under the crop residue management (CRM) scheme to make things easy. The modern machinery includes Super Seeder, two balers, mulcher, plough and rotavators, among others. For this year he has already got the booking for managing stubble on 600 acres.

“Stubble can be managed in three ways – one, by pressing the leftover stubble under the earth; second, to sow wheat directly in the standing stubble in the fields; and thirdly, to collect it in bundles. And I am managing it in all three ways,” Kuldeep said.

“During the season, I take around 12 tractors on rent for two months and keep a staff of about 22 people, including over a dozen drivers who can work on these tractors,” he said, adding that around half of the area “we cover with two balers and rack. The bales of straw are then supplied to power generation biomass plants, to factories, and to the Gujjars (traditional milch cattle rearer)”. The Gujjars have big dairies and they use the stubble as fodder for livestock.

There are several stubble-based industries which are coming up in the state and every farmer with a little effort can earn from it or improve soil health by incorporating it into the earth, he said.

“I have dedicated one baler each for collecting stubble from the fields of big and small & marginal farmers. The collection rate is between Rs 1,500 and Rs 3,500 per acre depending on the stubble quality, because sometimes farmers ask us to collect green stubble, which is of no use so we charge more,” he said.

“After paddy harvesting, two types of crops are sown namely wheat, and seasonal vegetables & potatoes. If wheat is to be sown post-paddy, then we employ a Super Seeder for stubble management as it not only incorporates the straw into the soil but also sows wheat in the process. For sowing potato we use mulcher and plough which give a more clean look to the field and then the vegetable is sown using a potato planter,” he said.

“When Happy Seeder, Super Seeder and Super SMS were not available, we used to manage stubble with straw chopper and mulcher machine, which cut the straw into small pieces, and then used rotavator for preparing fields,” he said, adding that if one has the will, then there are several ways to manage stubble.

The cost of stubble management is between Rs 2,500 and Rs 3,000 per acre. And if a farmer burns paddy stubble and then sows wheat or potato after preparing fields, even then he needs to spend around Rs 2,000 to Rs 4,000 on the preparation of the field only, he said.

He said that their collected stubble is sold at Rs 100 to Rs 300 per quintal depending on the demand and the place where they have to supply it.

“For this season, I have already started getting calls from my customers to reserve their dates for stubble management,” he said.

“After seeing my efforts, now several people in my village have started managing stubble by purchasing machines. Even my staff also bought machines to do independent work which is a great change of mindset among people. And this is what we need to propagate,” he said, adding that farmers need to understand that when they burn their fields, they become the first casualty as they are the first ones to inhale the poisonous smoke emanating from the blaze.

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And then, not to mention, the harm it does to the soil. Besides polluting the environment, the soil loses its invaluable nutrients as a result of stubble burning, he added.