Diversification must for sustainable farming: Expert

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, February 20

The School of Agriculture at Lovely Professional University (LPU) organised a two-day national conference ‘SAFNS-2018’. The main topic of the conference was ‘Sustainable Agriculture, Food and Nutritional Security’.

As many as 106 scientists and researchers, 384 research scholars, and hundreds of agriculture students from across the country participated in the conference.

Critically acclaimed and adjudged 307 research papers were also selected for publication. Academia and Industry stalwarts, including former Deputy Director General, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) Dr JS Sandhu, Director, ICAR-Central Institute of Post-Harvest Engineering and Technology, and other top scientists delivered keynote addresses during eight sessions of the conference.

Covering 20-plus important subtopics, including technologies for enhancing crop production and processing, the conference proved result-oriented by sensitising country’s present and would-be agriculturists, food technologists and nutritionists.

Much-awarded and commonly known as ‘pulse breeder scientist’, Dr Sandhu said diversification of crops was very important for sustainability in agriculture. There should be shift from traditional and less remunerable crops to high value crops, he added.

He also talked about intensive fodder production from degraded land, summer moong crop, maize as alternate crops to paddy and more to enhance the income of the farmers. Referring the country from “food-scarce” to presently a “food surplus” country, he urged all to think towards nutritional security.

Mr Ashok Mittal, Chancellor, LPU, said, “Agriculture is the most-important for us all as we can’t survive without food. I invoke next-gen students to share the responsibility and being practical in approach to bring forth solutions towards water scarcity, crop diversification and more.”

LPU Pro-Chancellor Rashmi Mittal, Vice-Chancellor Prof Dr Ramesh Kanwar, DG HR Singla, Senior Dean Dr Lovi Raj Gupta, Dean Ramesh Sadavarti, Dr N Kumar, Dr Raj Bala Grewal, Dr Parbhat Kumar, Dr BVC Mahajan, Dr Jitendra Kumar, Malvinder Malh, among others, were also present on the occasion.