Conservation Agriculture, Successful Mobile data service

1. The four-day World Congress on Conservation Agriculture (CA), beginning at New Delhi from February 4, will draw up a road map and strategies to promote CA.

Excerpts from the report:

"Presently over two million hectares area in the Indo-Gangetic plain and about two lakh hectares in Andhra Pradesh is under resource conservation technologies, and this is likely to go up at least four-five times in the next five years."

"Farmers who adopted conservation technologies are saving water and energy costs, attaining higher yields and getting more returns. Large-scale trials and farmers experiences show that the available technologies can be adopted in wide range of rainfed and irrigated environments."

2. Thomson Reuters announced that its ground-breaking mobile information service for India's agricultural community Reuters Market Light (RML) has sold over 100,000 three- month subscriptions since its launch just over a year ago.

Reuters Market Light, a pioneer in this field, provides customised and localised market intelligence to farmers in their local language including crop prices from local markets, local weather forecasts, and relevant agricultural news and crop advisory information. RML has built an end-to-end value chain from sourcing through to rural distribution to meet the decision-critical needs of the farming sector over mobile phones. It currently covers over 50 commodities and over 250 markets in the two states.