Delineation of Soil Fertility Status and KVK Intervention to Improve the Productivity of Pepper in TSP Villages of Namakkal District under Soil Health Card Mission

Abstract

Soil is the most important resource needed for agriculture production. The unbalanced fertilizer application associated with more production by high yield varieties affects the soil quality vulnerably. Soils of tribal areas, having multi nutrient deficiencies due to intense cropping especially spices Pepper, coffee, cardamom and banana. Balanced application of plant nutrients is thus the only option to increase soil productivity for maintaining/enhancing the overall soil productivity. Delineation of soil nutrient status is an important practice to plan the nutrient scheduling for pepper crop. Hence 100 soil samples were collected from five adopted villages and tested its properties. Based on the analytical results, soil health cards issued along with fertilizer recommendation. Then 50 farmers were selected, trained all scientific package of practices through trainings. The field experiment was conducted in 50 farmer’s field in an area of 20 ha. Pepper variety Panniyur 1 was the test crop. Application of soil test based integrated nutrient management practice increased the yield attributes and yield of pepper. An average of Rs. 74,220/ha net profit could be obtained by adopting all scientific package of practices in the farm holdings.