Commercial farming
Commercial vegetable farming has been identified by the government of Jammu and Kashmir as the main tool to provide better socio economic conditions to the farming community here.
Promotion of Vegetables/ Exotic Vegetables under Open and Hi-Tech Protected Cultivation’ is one among the 29 projects, which were approved by the Jammu and Kashmir administration after being recommended by the UT Level Apex Committee for holistic development of Agriculture and Allied Sectors in UT of J&K. The prestigious committee is headed by, Former DG ICAR and has other luminaries in the field of Agriculture, Planning, Statistics & Administration like, CEO NRAA, Dr. P. K Joshi, Secretary, NAAS, Dr., Horticulture Commissioner MOA & FW, Dr. H. S Gupta, Former Director, IARI, , ACS, APD, apart from the Vice Chancellors of the twin Agriculture Universities of the UT.
Presently, demand for vegetables in J&K is met by both domestic vegetable production to the tune of 1991.25 thousand metric tons worth Rs 3982.50 crores and imports of another 318.26 metric thousand tons valued at Rs. 636.52 crores annually. “The quality of imported vegetables in terms of nutritional value and freshness however, gets affected due to long transportation and perishable nature of the produce, due to which almost double than the estimated requirement for vegetables is imported and sold at high costs”, said Chowdhary Iqbal, Director Agriculture Kashmir, who is implementing the project in collaboration with SKUAST.
