The Karnataka Government has made budget provision of Rs 110 crore for watershed and soil enrichment (‘BhooChetana') project, for the year 2012-13, which is being implemented in collaboration with the International Crops Research Institute for Semi Arid Tropics (Icrisat).

Iran is seeking to close grain purchases using gold and oil as payment, and has paid yen for a large volume of wheat as it steps up efforts to beat sanctions that had started to choke imports of food staples, European wheat exporters said. Iran bought at least 2,00,000 tonnes of soft wheat on the world market last week for prompt delivery from private sellers — mostly of Australian origin — but some traders said the US could possibly account for part of the volume.

New Delhi: The government has asked states including Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Bihar to set up grain procuring infrastructure to increase lifting from the farmers so that requirement for the proposed food security law could be met. The Food Corporation of India, chairman and managing director, Siraj Hussain said state-level procuring agencies can help in arranging sufficient credit facilities for carrying out grain purchase activities without depending on the Central government.

Site helps peasants discuss prices and plan strategy. Last month, the turmeric farmers of Maharashtra’s Sangli district found themselves in a desperate situation. Oversupply had resulted in prices crashing in the local turmeric market, Asia’s biggest, threatening their livelihood. And with several thousands growing the commodity across Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, any meaningful strategy to halt the price crash meant involving a sizeable number of farmers.

Ahead of enacting the ambitious National Food Security Law, the government on Thursday approved setting up of a national centre for cold chain development and allocated a one-time grant of `25 crore as corpus fund. The Union Cabinet at its meeting here, which was chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, took the decision keeping in view the post harvest losses to the tune of `50,000 crore annually in absence of proper storage facilities.

Slash-and-burn agricultural practices, banned by governments because of the risk of uncontrolled fires, provide better growing conditions for valuable new trees than more modern methods of forest clearance, a study suggests.

Starting in 1996, researchers cleared 24 half-hectare areas of tropical forest in Quintana Roo state, in southern Mexico, using three methods: clear-felling, where most of the trees are cut down; bulldozing; and slash-and-burn, a practice common among smallholders, in which trees are felled, left to dry and then burned, to prepare the land for agriculture.