Sai Siddartha Maram(Centre) , Kamal Gupta(Right), Sushrita Yerra
INTRODUCTION
Quoting Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “ In many developing countries, farmers do not benefit from the advantages of using good quality seeds ..”. To test whether certain seeds are suitable for a particular area, in this case Gujarat, researches give out seeds of different varieties for farmers to try out and monitor the crop and it’s yield. Based on which, good quality seeds are identified. Until now, researchers at NIF have been distributing seeds to the farmers and the collection of crop data is done by scouts who would visit the farms at regular intervals and manually collect data. A group of scouts would leave for the fields and collect data from the farmers. This process lasts for a couple of days depending on the number of crops and number of farmers who sowed them. If 5 varieties of seeds were given to 5 farmers of a single crop, scout has to visit each one of them, collect data, segregate and tabularize it according to the attributes involved and only then could researchers start working on evaluating the performance of seeds. Research in agriculture generally takes long since data at every stage of the life cycle of the crop is required and the intricacies of the process have to be recorded. This method of collecting data is only making it longer, the team strongly feels that this is a dire need.
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