Water is a huge challenge
The path to food security begins by exploring the challenges, and Water being the key challenge. Crops and livestock need water to grow. Agriculture requires large quantities of water for irrigation and of good quality for various production processes. While feeding the world and producing a diverse range of non-food crops such as cotton, rubber and industrial oils in an increasingly productive way, agriculture also confirmed its position as the biggest user of water on the globe. Irrigation now claims close to 70 percent of all freshwater appropriated for human use.
Growing Demand for Fruits and Vegetables
In the present scenario of perpetual demand for better quality vegetables and continuously shrinking land holdings, protected cultivation is the best choice for quality produce and efficient use of land and other resources. It is the future of horticulture crop production in India due to the merits that it offers with reference to open field cultivation.
Protected cultivation means some level of control over plant microclimate to alleviate one or more of abiotic stresses for optimum plant growth which can be achieved in naturally ventilated poly-house or net-/polynet-house. Crop yields can be several times higher than those under open field conditions, quality of produce is superior, higher input use efficiencies are achieved.
High value crops like Tomato, capsicum, cucumber, melons, rose, gerbera, carnation and chrysanthemum can be grown under a vast range of protected structures like Polyhouses, Shade Nets, Poly-tunnels. These specialized structures allow us to regulate the agro-climatic conditions as per the needs of the crop. The most important advantage of growing crops under controlled conditions is increased production per unit area along with maintaining temperature, moisture, humidity, fertigation at an ambient level. In addition to this, it also allows us to keep the crops disease and pest free thereby improving the quality of the produce. The production per unit area from the same land and crop, can increase by 5-10 times through protected cultivation versus open field cultivation.
How Can We Help
Harvel is a turnkey solutions provider in the agricultural irrigation and protected cultivation sector with over 30 years of experience in serving more than 60,000 farmers across the country with its Micro Irrigation and greenhouse solutions. Harvel Greens, the Protected Cultivation Division of Harvel has taken the lead in the greenhouse segment by accomplishing some of the best Indian projects in protected cultivation like Center of Excellence at Indira Gandhi Krishi Vishwavidyalay, Raipur. This project is a Demonstration cum Technology Transfer Center where a vast range of horticulture crops like Tomatoes, Melons, Gladiolus are grown under various structures like Shade Nets, Polytunnels and Polyhouses. Not only this, disease free seedlings are raised in the same premises and are grown under controlled conditions with automated fertigation and filtration.
Harvel Greens is also going a step forward by penetrating at different levels to popularize the concept of protected cultivation to the masses. Harvel Greens offerings range from 160 sqm to 10 acres & above for growing fruits, vegetables, herbs for the following segments:
- Schools: Setting up small sized structures at educational institutes (schools/colleges) and helping them with agronomical services for making demonstration unit successful.
- Hotels: Small/ Midsized structures for Hotels where they can grow all kinds of exotic vegetables like Coloured Capsicum, Cherry Tomato, Seedless Cucumber for their self-sustenance.
- Central and State Governments: For demonstration and training purposes to farmers.
- Personal Growers/ Hobby Farmers: People who love gardening and have akitchen garden where they love to experiment by growing different types of popular crops.
- Corporates: For producing high quality and disease free fruits and vegetables/herbs for retail and export purposes.
Another flagship program of Harvel is iGrowFresh which supplements all the above by buying back surplus produce from HarvelGreen’s Greenhouse clients enabling them to get the best price for their extra produce without getting into the hassles of the marketing channels.
