Bhubaneswar: Nobel laureate Michael Kremer and a 12-member team from the University of Chicago visited Krushi Bhavan here Saturday, to discuss about ongoing research project on the weather forecast dissemination system and its rationality, validity, and acceptability among the farming community in the state.
Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment department Principal Secretary Arabinda Kumar Padhee, Agriculture and Food Production director Shubham Saxena, Soil Conservation and Watershed Development director Subrat Kumar Panda, scientists from OUAT and members of the Climate Resilience Cell (CRC) were also present in the meeting.
Kremer appreciated the department’s Krushi Samrudhi Helpline (KSH) initiative and noted that the outreach of KSH is helping last-mile farmers in saving their crops from climate-related challenges.
He also suggested introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based forecasting, taking rainfall, temperature, and humidity into account, to better predict pest incidences.
“Such forecasting would help farmers adopt precautionary and preventive measures to protect crops from abnormal weather occurrences,” he said, further emphasising that integrating multiple weather forecasting models with the existing KSH system of DA and FE is the need of the hour.
On the occasion, Padhee highlighted the department’s holistic approaches, including comprehensive rice fallow management for enriching soil biomass, crop insurance, customised agro-advisories, digital crop surveys, farmer registry, the Krushak Odisha database, adoption of stress-tolerant crop varieties and digital pest monitoring.
PNN
