Prime Minister of india Narendra Modi and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have joined hands for doubling the income of farmers by prompting horticulture through technology in Gujarat. Madhya Pradesh is also considering to develop Center of Excellence for horticulture crops drawing inspiration from Gujarat where Department of horticulture, Gujarat state under Indo – Israel Agriculture Project, has established the Center of Excellence for Datepalm.
The center is located 12 km from Bhuj city of Kutch district.
The main objective of this center is to train farmers as per Israel protocol of Datepalm cultivation. The center is established on 4 ha of land out of which 2.25 ha land is utilized for demonstration of Datepalm crop. This demonstration plot have 3.5 years old 262 tissue cultured datepalm plants at the distance of 9 * 9 m. out of that 17 plants are of ADP – 1 (red fruit) variety released by Anand Agriculture University, Gujarat and 245 plants are of Barhee (yellow fruit) variety. All the plants are provided with drip irrigation and plastic mulching which results in better utilization of water and nutrients by checking weed growth and water evaporation. This might be India’s only demonstration farm of datepalm having 100 % drip irrigation and plastic mulching technology. The center has facilities like Well-equipped training hall, Pack House with cold storage, Pollen storage facility @ - 21oC, Pollen testing lab, Net-house for hardening of plants raised from suckers. More than 3000 farmers have been trained here across Gujarat. The training consist aspect like nursery management, irrigation, fertigation, pollination, bunch care, harvesting and post-harvest handling. The center also have weather station from where daily evaporation of water is being measured.
