PAU holds training programme on produce enrichment

Tribune News Service

Ludhiana, July 11

To educate the trainees about enhancing income of the farmers through value addition/enrichment, the Punjab Agricultural Management and Extension Training Institute (PAMETI) organised a two-day training on “Enhancing farmers’ profit margins through enrichment in agricultural produce” from July 9 to 10.

HS Dhaliwal, director of PAMETI, encouraged the officials to utilise the opportunity of learning through such programmes and urged the participants about encouraging the farmers to set up entrepreneurial ventures such as Road Side Display (RSD) Model for direct marketing of their farm produce to increase their income.

Experts from various departments of PAU and CIPHET interacted with the participants and made them aware about the latest technologies that can add value to the final product and increase their profit margins. Sandeep Mann, HoD-cum-scientist at CIPHET, discussed the concept, scope, need and importance of value addition in agricultural products in the market.

An exposure visit was organised to Agro Processing Complex (APC), Department of Processing and Food Engineering and Food Industry Centre (FIC), Department of Food Science and Technology, PAU, to show various value-adding technologies such as processing and preservation techniques, dehydration and drying technology, freezing technology, packing, labelling developed by the department.

Participants agreed that value addition was an important concept and its approach in today’s business environment where profit margins mattered. The course also provided ideas and practices on deriving other marketable items or developing new ones from primary products, co-products, and even from by-products previously considered to be waste.