India today faces an important problem in its livestock based agriculture. In the preceding decades, agricultural residues which used to form the major source of cattle feed has substantially reduced its share in the proportion of national cattle feed. This is because of the low straw grain ratio of high yielding varieties.
The straw quality is also nutritionally low. With shrinking grazing lands and expanding cities, marginal dairy farmers have to depend more and more on commercial cattle feed or worse allow their cattle to scavenge the wastes. Further there is an increasing deficiency in biologically fixed Nitrogen with the loss of cultural practices like crop rotation and also loss of agricultural farmlands. Loss of Nitrogen thus becomes loss of soil nutrients for plants and loss of plant nutrients for animals and ultimately food crisis for humanity.
The deficiency in biologically fixed Nitrogen is compensated today by chemical fertilizer, the excess application of which makes the soil almost biologically dead. This chemical residue in food and environment leads to a variety of new generation diseases in both humans and also human domesticated animals. The deficiency of protein in livestock and humans is compensated by industrially produced chemical protein analogues like urea and melamine in feed and food. This also has dangerous side-effects. This is one of the main reasons for the incidence of new generation diseases of our vital organs like liver, kidneys, pancreas and heart. Further all these chemical production technologies are capital intensive and energy intensive and make the livelihood of ordinary farmers extremely dependent on heavy industries – leading to lesser profits for farmers and more pollution for environment. The hidden costs of these technologies exceed the accured benefits of these technologies.
Then there are alternate technologies particularly for solving fodder problem. But they too have some inherent problems. Thus the macro-fodders like Hybrid Napier, Subabul, Cowpea and Sorghum cannot be cultivated by marginal dairy farmers for want of land availability. In the case of micro-fodders like Single Cell Protein Anabaena and Spirulina, there are technological limitations for the marginal farmers.
Dr.P.Kamalasanan Pillai, Senior Scientist of Vivekananda Kendra – NARDEP while working on a holistic model of creating sustainable farming technologies, discovered the solution to many of the above problems in a tiny ancient fern plant, Azolla with BGA as its symbiont.
Evolutionarily, it is the symbiotic combination of this same plant, which made this earth habitable and productive for present form of Oxygen-dependent life eons back. Today Azolla is an endangered fern entered in the red data book. However it has been brought back from the edge of extinction, thanks to Azolla technology developed by Dr.Pillai, who has continuously worked on strain improvement and selection over the period of more than a decade.
Dr.Pillai today offers Azolla as an organic bionitrogen production system, bio-protein production system and a carbon-di-oxide sink. He also has found Azolla to be an Oxygen generator and a synthesizer of a variety of vital amines and mineral proteins. Though the nitrogen fixing capacity of Azolla was known earlier, there was no fool-proof technology package for its mass production and efficient usage.
Dr.Pillai developed a stress tolerant strain, along with a cost-effective technology package for backyard cultivation, a de-centralized package for mass cultivation, feeding package for each group of livestock. He also developed a technology for high value Azolla production for feed pellet production. This technology allows further harnessing of its potentials as a nutraceutical. Dr.Pillai’s work transcends the walls of research lab and has been taken to the people and has had revolutionary impact on the ground. The production technology is not only easily adaptable but also can be efficiently integrated with the agro-eco system of the farmer. Thousands of farmers from Kerala, Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh and also others part of the country, took up the backyard Azolla cultivation to feed their livestock with good results, increasing the milk, meat and egg production significantlyreducing the external inputs.
The one and a half decade work of Dr.Kamalasanan Pillai, in not only innovative research but also zealously taking the technology to the people, received recognition this year by way of ‘Societal Innovation Award – 2010’ from National Research Development Corporation, New Delhi (Ministry of Science and Technology). The award carries a certificate and a prize money of Rs.3 lakhs which will be given at a public function sometime in February, 2012.
To get more information about VKNARDEP please visit http://www.vknardep.org
