Yasir Wardad
Potato farmers who suffer financial losses every year due to outbreak of late blight disease in their farms could now get relief, as a project has been launched under which geo-data are being used to forecast the fungal infection, officials said.
To make the farmers aware and help them take preventive measures, the project 'Geopotato' is being implemented on the public private partnership (PPP) basis.
Late blight (phytophthora infestans) is the most common and highly destructive fungal disease in potato, tomato and other 'solanaceae' crops in Bangladesh.
The disease damages minimum 25 per cent of the potato production a year, according to Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI).
The three-year Geopotato project began on pilot basis in Rangpur and Munshiganj, the highest potato-growing regions in the country, Agricultural Information Services (AIS) spokesman Md Golam Mawla told the FE.
The Geopotato consortium consists of seven public and private organisations, including Wageningen University and TerraSphere (Netherlands), AIS, Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, mPower (Bangladesh) and ICCO-Cooperation (Bangladesh).
Golam Mawla said the project has been taken up to develop and implement a decision support service (DSS) in Bangladesh for working out an optimal control strategy for late blight disease.
The DSS will give preventive spray advice to farmers when a late blight infection period is predicted to occur, he said.
It also evaluates past sprays and curative spray advice.
The system evaluates this information to provide farmers with a timely spray advice through their mobile phone, said Golam Mawla.
Md Zahedul Haque Chowdhury, Uapazila Agricultural Officer (UAO) at Pirgachha, Rangpur, told the FE over phone that two automatic observatory weather systems have been set up at Tambulkhana in Pirgachha and Taraganj in Rangpur last year.
The system could measure temperature, humidity, rain and many other aspects within a 15-kilometre radius, he said.
Farmers in adjacent areas can now register for information through the number '09678774422', he added.
Md Nazrul Islam, agriculture adviser to mPower (Bangladesh), a leading partner of the project, told the FE that farmers got bumper potato yield in the pilot project areas despite unfavourable weather condition, thanks to the forecast by the DSS.
He said the project, which spent a maximum of Tk 300 million, helped grow an additional 1.0 million tonnes of potato worth Tk 8.0 billion in Rangpur and Munshiganj districts last season.
The potato production hit a record 10.02 million tonnes last year in the country, said Mr Islam, also former director of AIS.
He said the government should adopt 'the Geopotato' project as a regular programme across the country to boost potato production.
According to mPower, the expected farmer benefits from the project range between Euro 100 and 250 per hectare, depending on the farmers' current agricultural management and disease control system.
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