Weather based Agro-advisories

Dr. Lobzang Stanzen, Dr. Ashu Sharma
World Meteorological Day is observed every year on March 23 to highlight the importance of the role that people and their behaviour play in protecting Earth’s atmosphere. The day also commemorates the establishment of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which was created on March 23, 1950. The purpose of writing this article is to keep in mind the theme of this year world Meteorological Day “Early Warning and Early Action”. Agriculture and allied sectors are both the cause and vulnerable to the climate change. It is very difficult to balance the growing interest on sophistication and climate change mitigation options. Increasing intensity of cyclonic disturbances over India and the changes in the monsoon rainfall will be ranged between 2% and 12%. In the recent past, the same is being experienced in many parts of India. Another report endorsed in IPCC alarmed that Indian region would get a decline in food production of 15-25% in the southern parts and 25-50% in the northern parts of India. The present trends of global climate change, atmospheric CO2 and temperature levels are likely to increase in future, which will affect yields, water and nitrogen requirements of the crops in a given region. The Food and Agriculture Organization warns that a global temperature increase of 2-4°C over pre-industrial levels could reduce crop yields by 15-35% in Africa and Asia and 25-35% across the Middle East. In India, the Indo-Gangetic Plains could become significantly heat-stressed by 2050 potentially causing losses of 50% of its wheat-growing area (Porter et al. 2014). Increases in day and night temperature were also found to negatively affect the growth, development and yield of rice and wheat crop, which are indeed the staple food crop of India. Without adaptation by 2050, crops and livestock are likely to experience significant reduction in production. For instance, India’s climate is projected to increase by 2-4 °C by 2050 with some marginal changes in rainfall during monsoon months and large changes in rainfall during non-monsoon months. An increase of 2 °C in temperature could decrease rice yields by about 0.75 tonnes per hectare in the high yielding areas. In a nutshell, the spatial and temporal shift in quantity and distribution of rainfall resulted in change of length of growing season and crop potential. Further, the erosion, degradation, pollution and overexploitation of natural resources increase the vulnerability of farming to climate change.
The climate induced biotic stresses add further deterioration and thus reduce the resilience of Indian farming. While major part of Indian agriculture business is dependent on resource poor marginal farmer, the coping capacity of the small and marginal farmers during climatic extremities is highly limited. The foremost concern at this stage is to forgo the impact of climate change and climatic variability, which could be possible by avoiding, escaping and adapting. Good agricultural practices, viz., suitable crop adjustment, developing proper genotypes, adopting improved management technologies against changed environment, soil and water conservation and finding alternatives, are the need of the hour. Agricultural scientists in ICAR and SAUs are working with dedication to moderate the impact of climate change on the production sector and continuously improving available technologies or developing new technologies to cope up emerging needs.
These technological improvements should reach the farming community on need. If the farmer gets weather-based technical inputs at the right time, he could himself manage against the weather abnormalities and produce more for him and his country. The bottleneck in this juncture is transfer of technologies from lab to land. It is accepted that there is a failure in our extension system due to many reasons, which drew our technology’s outreach. Now, we are in the stage of bolstering adaptation process to cope up our production with demand. Weather based agro advisory for multiple crops and different stages of crop growth have been developed with the help of technocrats and incorporated in the database. Weather based agro advisories helps the farmers to get timely weather based agro advisories to make necessary decision for the next few days of farm operations. As we know that agricultural sectors contributes a huge percent to the Indian economy and Indian farmer largely depends on the Monsoon rains for their agricultural operation. At present, about 60% of total net sown area is rainfed, contributing a significant amount of the total food production as well as to the livestock population. Weather plays an important role in agricultural production. Besides rainfall, others weather parameters are also playing an important role in influencing agricultural production. Unfavorable weather conditions are major concerns to the farming community.
The advance prediction of these weather events and crop planning based on prediction would help the farmer enormously in reducing the crop losses under aberrant weather situations and also taking-up suitable contingency measures. Under Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa project (GKMS), India Meteorological Department, Ministry of Earth Science in collaboration with Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), District Agro-meteorological Unit (DAMU) and Agro-meteorological Field Unit (AMFU) are issuing crop and location specific weather based agro advisories for the benefit of farming community on every Tuesday and Friday at district as well as blocks level. The major objective of this programme is to advise timely and need-based crop management practices. Weather parameters influence on agricultural operations and farm production. Aberrant weather is one of the most important reason for crop losses in India. The losses could be minimized by making modification in field operation by using weather based agro advisories. Normally a medium range weather forecast includes the following parameters: amount of rainfall, maximum and minimum temperature type of cloud over, maximum and minimum temperature, wind speed and direction issue for 5 days in advance. Survey conducted at different locations found an increase in benefit of farmers who followed weather based advisories as compared to no advisory followed farmers. The additional benefit was due to the crop management done by the farmers according to weather condition.
(The authors are scientist Agro-meteorology of KVK Reasi & Kathua, SKUAST-Jammu)

Follow our WhatsApp channel