Tierra Seed Science Pvt. Ltd. Golkonda, Hyderabad, Telangana

On the production front, de-risking cotton cultivation holds key to sustainable cotton growth. Mechanization is a logical choice when the country is looking for improvements in the quality of fiber, yields, farm productivity and ways for managing the agriculture labor concerns. Policy support in the form of allocating higher research resources, evolving robust extension support and extending financial incentives for growers and ginners will significantly impact the speed of mechanization and is recommended. Promoting the desi cotton cultivation, INM, IPM and efficient irrigation systems offer a viable alternative cotton farming system to mitigate the increased risks. Also, stakeholders across the value chain must up the ante to address the social malady of rampant child labor in commercial cotton cultivation.

To address the challenges of low productivity and mechanisation in cotton picking we @ Tierra, for the first time in India, have developed and successfully tested 3 hybrids with plant architecture suitable for High Density Planting System (HDPS) with over 80% synchronous boll maturity.HDPS is planting of more number of plants per unit area. Apart from higher yields, HDPS maximises the efficiency of costly farm inputs. In HDPS the plant population is 28000 to 30000 plants per acre compared to 8000 to 10000 in conventional planting systems. Hybrids available in the market today are not suitable for HDPS and machine picking. Apart from breeding for HDPS and machine picking cotton, other research priorities at Tierra are sucking pest tolerance, drought tolerance and better fibre quality. Tierra collaborates with National Botanical Research Institute (CSIR) to discover molecular markers for various important genetic traits in cotton. For more details and product enquiries contact here.