Pest and Pesticides are a serious problem in agriculture causing substantial losses to farmers. Extensive monocultures of crops and varieties, the increased use of chemical pesticides has disturbed the ecological balance which leading to pest outbreaks, the selection pressure leads to resurgence and resistance among insects and the pesticide residues into air, soil, water and food has serious environmental and health effects.
The problem cannot be addressed by replacing one chemical with another or replacing a chemical with a biopesticide or a decoction. The frame work for an ecological pest management would be based on restoring ecological balance by making changes in cropping patterns and crop production practices.
Non Pesticidal Management is one such approach where farmers can manage pests without using chemical pesticides. Centre for Sustainable Agriculture is one of the pioneer in evolving this model in partnership with farmers, grassroot organisations; and scaling up through various programs across the country from 2004 onwards. Some of the success stories can be read here http://www.csa-india.org/non-pesticidal-management
After implementing in the 2005-06 NPM is widely accepted by academicians, developmental organisations and in agroecological approaches. In these 15 years, NPM has also evolved based on the issues faced, lessons learnt and resource constraints in some areas. With all those learning, the course is designed to suite the front-line workers and resource persons to take the approach to the farmers.
After the training, the participants have to apply the learning in their areas of work. For the next one season for the issues they face, the support mechanism like interactions, suggestions to the issues they could not identify or solution related issue, CSA would provide the support.
Medium of instruction: English
This is an online live course for 3 days each day 3 hrs from 2.30 pm to 6.30 pm with a break.
The main content of the course
- Understanding Agroecological approach to Pest and Disease Management
- Why Insects becomes pests and how to manage them
- Why soils and plants are prone to diseases and their management
- When farm diversity becomes ‘weeds’ and their management
- Issues with agro-chemicals – pesticides, weedicides, fertilizers – impact on climate change
- Risky technologies in pest management – Genetically modified organisms
- Crop group wise pest and disease management
- Cereals, oilseeds, pulses and spices
- Vegetables
- Fruits
- Understanding botanicals and microbials and their use in pests and disease management
- Farm made Preparations, bioenterprises and commercial organic formulations for pest and disease management
- Tools for pest and disease monitoring-Pestoscope, pestSmart
- Organising Farmer Field Schools for teaching Non Pesticidal Management
Followup: participants of every course will get opportunity to meet once in a month to discuss about the issues faced in implementation for one year.
Fee: Rs. 2000/- please pay here https://www.payumoney.com/events/#/buyTickets/2020sept_npm