Her Excellency Ms Harinder Sidhu Australian High Commissioner visits Borlaug Institute for South Asia, Ladhowal, Ludhiana and Climate Smart Village, Noorpur Bet

Australian High Commissioner visited Borlaug Institute for South Asia, Ladhowal, Ludhiana on 19 February 2018. Dr. AK Joshi, Managing Director BISA & CIMMYT Representative in India, welcomed Her Excellency Ms Sidhu and explained about the genesis, mission and activities of Borlaug Institute for South Asia (BISA) as well as International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). Dr. HS Sidhu (Senior Research Engineer, BISA) explained about the ‘The happy journey of The Happy Seeder- A series of advancements’ made under the research project funded by Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) during 2002-2010 at PAU Ludhiana and latter at (CIMMYT)-BISA in collaboration with PAU and machinery manufacturers and farmers. He also explained about the latest improvements made in the Happy Seeder and the development of super SMS (straw management system) attached to combine harvester which provided impetus to the large-scale adoption of Happy Seeder technology. Dr Sidhu explained economic, soil health, water savings and environmental benefits from the adoption of Happy Seeder technology. Her excellency showed too keen interest in the unique Happy Seeder machine which enables direct seeding of wheat into heavy loads of rice residue without burning and was highly impressed with excellent wheat crop on about 400 acres planted with Happy Seeder. Later on, Dr Atwal showed the experiments on the Use of Happy Seeder for commercial seed production. Dr HS Sidhu and Dr ML Jat, Principal Researcher at CIMMYT shared and demonstrated the cutting edge research on precision water & nutrient management as well as genotype x management interactions under conservation agriculture based systems so as to make farming sustainable and resilient and achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs). Dr Jat further highlighted that future farming will be more stressed with projected climate change scenario and hence we need work more aggressively on new innovation to sustain the food bowl. Dr AK Joshi conducted the visit of Her Excellency to the Germplasm trails on stress tolerant in wheat.
Her excellency also visited a climate smart village (CSV) Noorpur Bet adopted under CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) by CIMMYT & BISA where a stakeholder consultation was also organized on scaling happy seeder technology for promoting no-burning farming. Dr ML Jat, Leader of CIMMYT-CCAFS climate smart agriculture explained the concept of climate smart village (CSV) and science based evidence based generated from different climate smart agriculture technologies, practices and services through farmers participatory research and largescale adoption of these technologies. In the stakeholder consultation, learnings on happy seeder as well as other conservation agriculture and climate smart agriculture technologies and their business models were shared by the range of stakeholders. Dr BS Sidhu, Commissioner Agriculture, Govt of Punjab chaired the Stakeholder consultation and shared his experiences as well as Govt of Punjab’s plans and policies for the farmers to promote happy seeder as well as other technologies.
Her Excellency, Ms Harinder Sidhu in her address shared her experiences from her visit to BISA as well as CSV. Am very impressed to see all these developments and enthusiasm of the farmers and other stakeholders for scaling conservation agriculture practices for sustaining the food bowl. There are so many things common in Punjab and Australia and hence a lot can be learnt from each other’s experiences, she added.
This half day visit and interaction was attended by around 200 key stakeholders including officers from Govt of Punjab, ICAR, PAU-KVKs, PACS, BISA- CIMMYT-CCAFS, manufacturers, farmers, custom operators of Happy Seeder etc.