AGRICULTURE AND IRRIGATION

MANURES

It has been a constant struggle of man to compensate for the deficiencies of land by means of irrigation, manures including chemical fertilizers, improved strains of seeds, improved agricultural implements, etc. With the help of these he has succeeded to a great extent in raising the output from land. Of these measures irrigation and manures, if they are simultaneously made available, yield better results. Since long, the application of manure has been an essential feature of agricultural operations in the district. It has been recorded in the old gazetteer of the district that even before 1909. the cultivators freely employed the manure in the rice tracts both for rice and sugarcane. The only forms of manure which were then common were the cattle droppings and house-sweepings. These were kept in an open pit till May when the stock was carted to the fields and dumped down in situ in heaps. The cultivators did not care either to store the manure in a scientific way by digging up a pit or prevent manure from losing its qualitative contents by evaporation when dumped in heaps in the fields. Such heaps were mixed with soil after the first showers of the monsoon. Many cultivators, as they do now. used to keep several cattle simply for the sake of obtaining their manure. The most heavily manured crops then were rice and sugarcane, particularly the latter, for which the expensive process of picketing goats and sheep on the field at night was ordinarily employed. The charge for picketing a flock for twelve days was Rs. 4. In the open tracts, cotton and wheat were often manured and jowar occasionally. Except in the Warora tahsil, comparatively little use was made of manure in these tracts.

With the implementation of planning in the post independence period the conditions, however, have changed. The chemical fertilisers have come to be adopted on a large scale. The information regarding the scientific storage of manure in a pit and the method of applying the chemical fertilisers to various crops are being disseminated by the official staff as well as by the social workers. The common cultivator, however, is gradually getting acquainted with these modern methods. In the rural areas of the district the fertilisers are distributed through the co-operative societies which in turn get the stock of fertilisers from the organisation at the district level. The farmers are also induced by the Panchayat Samitis and the Zilla Parishad to increase the supply of manure by digging up compost pits and following the method of green manuring, etc. The efforts in this direction are also strengthened by launching State sector schemes such as the development of local manurial resources, fertiliser and varietal trial scheme and the simple manurial trials scheme. The first scheme has been in operation in the district since 1962, and includes four sub-schemes viz., (1) town (urban) compost. (2) rural compost, (3) green manuring, and (4) hand flush latrine. The object of this scheme is to induce the urban centres i.e., municipal committees, cantonment boards and bigger village panchayats having a population of 5,000 and above to start the work of composting from night soil and other organic town waste. A Compost Inspector having the whole district as his jurisdiction is appointed under the officer incharge of Residuary Activities to execute the scheme in the district. The production of town compost under the scheme in the district during 1966-67 was 5,059.680 metric tonnes (4.980 tons) of which 1,491.996 metric tonnes (1,468.5 tons) have been distributed. Under the scheme of hand flush latrines, 600 latrine sets have been distributed in the district.

Very often sann hemp is cultivated mainly as a green manure crop. When it is grown for this purpose, its seed is sown soon after the commencement of the monsoon showers. The crop is sown thick and grows very fast. After about two months its vegetative growth is mixed with soil by ploughing and levelling it. It adds a good percentage of nitrogen to the soil.

The execution of the other two schemes, viz., fertiliser and varietal trial scheme and the simple manurial trials scheme, is more in the nature of research. Its main object is to conduct fertiliser and varietal trials to observe the effects of the fertiliser over different varieties of a crop. The following statement shows the progress so far achieved under the scheme: -

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