Source:business-standard.com
Dairy farming as such might sound mundane, but big co-operatives are increasingly taking the help of technology heavy-weights like Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to help them track the milk system at a village level more efficiently.
The National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), has taken help of satellite imaging technology to track the animal population, fodder status, as well as land use patterns at a village level. For that matter, an NDDB project won an award at the Geosmart India 2016 for developing ‘internet-based dairy geographical information system’ or IDGIS.
IDGIS is basically a strong visualisation tool, which not only enables identification of villages but also integrates human census, livestock census & land-use and land-cover of villages, in all the major milk producing states of India. It has been developed by NDDB, primarily to support the Milk Unions.
A senior NDDB official said that around 500,000 villages have been covered under the IDGIS, and this helps the milk unions to plan their village level activities more efficiently.
Anand-based NDDB has also joined hands with the Space Applications Centre-an arm of ISRO, and have completed a pilot study of fodder growing areas in Banaskantha district of Gujarat last year using satellite imaging. The move is expected to help policy makers address the issue of scarcity of cattle-fodder in the country.
NDDB informed that it is now trying to replicate the same in other areas. The project assumes significance, when we pitch this against the current fodder growing pattern in India. While India is the largest milk producing country in the world, around 80 per cent of dairy farmers are small and marginal, who typically contribute about 70 per cent of the total milk production. They, however, do not own much farm land, and as per industry estimates only 5 per cent of the country’s farmland as such is devoted to fodder farming.
ISRO had already successfullu developed the crop production forecasts (FASAL) technology, for major food crops, using remote sensing techniques. However, as the NDDB official informed fodder crops are normally grown sparsely and in very small plots by our farmers, typically one hectare or less. “This makes the job of discrimination of these crops through remote sensing quite challenging,” he added.
The pilot project at Banaskanth could estimate the area under green fodder crops in the district (81 thousand hectares) and the fallow areas & culturable wastelands (57 thousand hectares) with 77 per cent accuracy level. It also pointed out that around 35 per cent of the villages in this Gujarat district has more than 5 per cent wasteland which could be developed to grow fodder.
The official further explained that the aim of the study was that the data generated could help use available fodder optimally. That is to say, one can plan well in advance based on data on fodder availability in case of any shortage situation. Fodder prices have been escalating in the past few years and industry insiders claim that it has nearly doubled in the past ten years. Fodder shortage is estimated to rise to 400 million tonnes by 2025.
This study will now be scaled up at the state and national level.
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