Sundargarh: Cold rooms play a vital role in enhancement of sustainable livelihood of farmers with tonnes of vegetables and farm produce getting wasted every year in the country, a report said. One of the important reasons behind the wastage is the lack of storage facilities for agricultural produce for which it becomes all the more important to take care of the farm produce and minimise wastage as much as possible. And cold rooms will play a vital role in safeguarding the interests of farmers. The matter came to the fore at a workshop on cold room management for the enhancement of sustainable livelihood of farmers held at the regional resources centre, Friday.
The workshop was held under the aegis of Koel Fresh Pvt Ltd, PCFPC, a consortium of farmers’ producer organisation (FPO) and voluntary outfit ‘Sewak’ in the town Farmers, agri-preneurs, representatives from FPOs, NGOs, etc. from various districts and neighbouring state participated in the workshop. Experts from BASE and EMPA (Switzerland) interacted with the participants and shared their expertise with them.
The event was inaugurated by District Collector Nikhil Pavan Kalyan while MLA Kusum Tete graced the occasion in the valedictory session The workshop focused on familiarising the stakeholders with the proper way of operating a cold room where the participants were taught on operation and maintenance of cold room, capacity building of operators, CaaS (Cooling as a Service) around the world, importance of digitalization of farmers’ data and cold room, sensors and shelf-life prediction of agricultural produce, best practices of cold room and government schemes for cold room.