Agriculture is not just cows and plows…its more than that!

Today agriculture field has many new things to do, about which normal city people are not aware of. From planting improved variety of seeds to implementing new enhanced farming techniques and implements, farming is not less than any rocket science. And very few farmers are there who understands that changing farming practices with the changing time can help them alleviate the future risks. One such a farmer from Sarod village of Sangrur district who understood the fact of changing with the time very well is S. Avtar Singh Ratol.

32 is a great number of experience for a farmer, and S. Avtar Singh Ratol has used it well in shaping his horticulture career in the right direction. He started cultivating vegetables in 50 acres in the beginning and slowly expanded his farming reach to a greater area. For better irrigation he implanted underground pipeline in 47 acres which benefited him a lot in the future.

To boost up his farming productivity, he took training from Agriculture Science Centre and Farm Advisory Service Centre in Sangrur. From the knowledge that he gained during his training, he built two high-tech poly-houses in 4000 square feet and started cultivating cucumber and gerbera flower in it. Currently, his annual income from the cultivation of cucumber and gerbera is around 7.5 lakh rupees which are more than enough to manage his farming inputs.

Horticulture became S. Avtar Singh Ratol’s full-time passion and to give a kick to his arousing interest he went abroad to learn advance horticulture techniques. Abroad visit had positive results on the farm productivity and S. Avtar Singh Ratol achieved huge success in the crop cultivation of potatoes, pepper, melon, capsicum, wheat, etc. Besides this, he also started preparing the vegetable nursery and selling it to other farmers.

Adopting drip irrigation to save water, developing a small Trans-Planter to plant the vegetable sapling and perform many other tasks and using low tunnel technique, are some of his achievements which helped him doing successful cultivation of capsicum and many other vegetables. He faced no difficulty in implementing all these modern farming techniques at his farm, which encouraged him to progress more.