Indian meteorologists' state of the art weather forecast to aid farmers

New Delhi, Jan. 8 (ANI): Indian meteorologists say that they have top-of-the range technology to collect and prepare weather forecast reports that are especially beneficial to farmers who depend on the monsoon for their crops.

This was disclosed by Dr. K K Singh, a scientist at the Indian Meteorological Department at New Delhi.

He said that the Agro-Met-Advisory-Service is helping the farmers in timing their crop-related activities with the weather.

India farmers depend on the monsoons to irrigate 60 percent of their arable lands for the Kharif (summer) and Rabi (winter) harvest.

"Both components for forecasting and agro advisory preparation here is state-of-the-art technology being used in the country. We have conducted our economic impact. For any service, now it's sort of mandatory that to carry out the economic impact, what's the economic benefit of a service run in the country. The economic impact was done through 15 units. It was not conducted at all the units to just have an initial workout how much benefit is there and definitely it provides benefits in cutting the cost input, unnecessarily farmers don't put the inputs at the same time it doesn't result... and secondly judicious use of resources that helps in getting maximum production from a particular field," said Dr K. K. Singh, senior meteorologist, Indian Meteorological Department, New Delhi.

In India, agriculture is a weather dependent activity and all farm management decisions such as selection of crop variety date of sowing, choice, method, quantity and type of farm inputs (fertiliser, pesticide, herbicide, irrigation), inter-cultural operations, harvesting and post harvesting practices are weather sensitive.

To get benefits from the available resources and climate conditions, agro-meteorological information is necessary in farm planning to ensure sustainable crop production.

"Agriculture always requires some kind of management steps - if you have the rain, then what to do and if you don't have the rain then what to do. Therefore it is in a particular state what to do you needed to know what's going to happen three days ahead or five days ahead. So you can mobilize your resources. Your resources could be water, electricity, pesticides... ...able to advise them three days ahead what meteorological phenomenon is going to occur exactly in that region which is the most challenging task and that's going to give a cutting edge to agriculture," observed B Mukhopadhyay, Deputy Director General, Indian Meteorological Department.

To provide weather-based agro advisories to farmers in India is a complex proposition because of variety of climatic zones leading to a variety of cropping patterns. (ANI)