‘Nitrogen, phosphorus fertiliser can increase income by Rs260b’

LAHORE
THE balanced use of fertilizers can increase the production of major crops up to 50 percent, said Dr. Iqrar Ahmad Khan, Vice-Chancellor, Agriculture University of Faisalabad, during a media briefing about the models developed by University of Agriculture Faisalabad for correct prediction of fertilizer doses at Punjab Agriculture House on Thursday.
Dr. Muhammad Rashid, Principal Investigator, M. Rafiq Akhtar, Director Agricultural Information Punjab, and a large number of media-persons attended the briefing.
He explained that these models had been developed as a result of untiring hard-work and efforts of Prof. Dr. Iqrar Ahmad Khan in cooperation with the Agriculture Department. He said Country Manager ICARDA Dr. Abdul Majid was playing a pivotal role in this regard. The US Aid and ICARDA are providing financial and technical support to communicate the information about these models to farmers, he added.
He informed the media that in Punjab province 80 to 90 percent soil had become phosphorus deficient due to which agriculture production had decreased considerably.
While speaking on this occasion, Dr. Muhammad Rashid said that balanced use of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers for wheat, rice, cotton, sugarcane and maize on 50 percent area of these crops could give an additional income up to 260 billion rupees.
Revealing the declining trend of use of phosphorus fertilizer, he said that average use of phosphorus fertilizer increased from 26 kg per hectare in 2004-05 to 41 kg per hectare in 2006-07 but again came down to 26 kg per hectare in 2011-12 due to price hike of fertilizers. He gave a detailed briefing about the fertilizer dose prediction models of various crops on the district basis.
Highlighting the importance of the models, Dr. Rashid told the media that in view of ever-increasing prices of fertilizers, these models were highly important as using these models farmers could predict correct doses of fertilizers in accordance with the desired production levels. He said models provided an opportunity to growers to obtain the yield according to their resources. In this way, unnecessary use of fertilizers can be avoided. Informing about the main benefit of these models, he said these models facilitated farmers to obtain information about fertilizer doses while sitting at homes and they could also obtain desired level of agriculture production. He said that more information about these models could be obtained from website www.fertilizeruaf.pk.
Rafiq Akhtar, Director Agricultural Information Punjab, emphasised the role of media to provide latest research information to farmers. Representative of ICARDA assured his full cooperation regarding different plans for increasing the agriculture production in Pakistan.