Experts at a seminar on paradoxical agriculture underscored the need to restore the natural agriculture cropping system with zero use of fertilizer and pesticides thereby to reduce the cost of production and ensuring more crop yield than the chemical agriculture. The event was organized by Office of Research, Innovations, and Commercialization (ORIC), here at New Senate Hall of the varsity on Friday morning.
Addressing the participants, acclaimed and prolific agricultural expert Mr. Asif Sharif said he was a hands on job farmer who spent years to enhance his understanding on agriculture and now he was of the view not to spend much on the production rather place a cropping system which is sustainable and ensures biodiversity. He told the participants that he was the person who introduced laser land leveling in the country and has a vigor to design ever-new farm machinery aimed at making the agriculture more precision, sustainable and profitable. He described paradoxical agriculture a science of ecosystem with less inputs and high profit “consumers are paying for farmers’ inefficiencies” he maintained. Mr. Asif Sharif told that he had introduced an initiative One Acre Prosperity (OAP) that, he believes, would enable the farmer to easily earn more than 600,000/- profit per year without investing on input side. While rejecting the philosophy of more yield, he maintained that the same amount of yield could be obtained by practicing the paradoxical agriculture that is organic and natural. UAF Vice Chancellor Prof. Dr. Muhammad Ashraf (HI) while referring a Chinese philosophy of bio-healthy agriculture said an average landholding is not more than six kanals but they are earning a huge sum of profit by erecting two tunnels and applying vermi-compost as fertilizer. He said today all new cropping models are stressing upon conserving the biodiversity that ensures soil, crop and human health. Highlighting the story of his outreach activity with Water Manager Research Center (WMRC) team in the outskirts of the town, he told that his team did a raise bed intervention for carrot cultivation on four acres of land of a farmer who sold his 3-month crop against 1.6 million rupees. He told the surrounding farmers were vigorous that they would adopt the same raise bed technology for carrot in future. Dr. Mahmood Ahmad from LUMS endorsed the idea of paradoxical agriculture and said they calculated cost-benefit ratio and did a comparison between chemical and paradoxical agriculture that concludes an investment of 84 and 36 rupees against an income of Rs. 100 respectively in both approaches. DG Agriculture Extension Dr. Anjum Ali Butter, Director ORIC, Dr. Zahir Ahmad Zahir, and Deputy Director ORIC Dr. Abdul Rasheed Malik also spoke on the occasion.
