Potato

Soils And Climate

Soil and climatic requirements

Potato is a cool season crop which can be grown upto an elevation of 3,500 m.s.l.
Highest average yields are usually obtained where day length is 13 to 17 hours during the growing season.
The thermal optimum is 20 to 45° C but at 30 to 35° C, respiration rate increases.

Frost free days and clear sky is essential for growth and development.
It has been observed that CO2 fixation is nearly half at 30,000 lux as compared to 50,000 lux.
Soils are of special significance for tuber crops like potato, since loose friable soil is a pre-requisite for developing stolen and tubers.
Tubers grown in darkness, and when exposed to light, turn green due to the excessive formation of solanin-an alkaloid.
Hence, cracking black cotton soils are not suitable. Alluvial soil, red and laterites with friable porous texture are ideally suited for potato culture.
In India, majority area is under alluvial soils (77%) followed by acidic hill soils (13%) and black and red soils (7.9%).
The productivity is also in that order. Potato is well suited to acidic soils.
The optimum pH range is from 5.2 to 6.5.
Sandy, well drained looms with high organic matter content are best for potato growing.
It is moderately susceptible to salinity and the threshold value for yield decline is 1.7 ds/m.
In tropics, the major constraint to potato production is the soil type which are highly weathered, leached, depleted of nutrients with low CEC.
The soils are acidic, with pH 5 or less.
Toxicity due to high concentrations of Al and high P fixation are reported to drastically reduce potato yield.
It is a short duration crop and grows in large amounts in Hassan, chikmangalore, Dharwar and Belgaum districts under rainfed conditions.
It is also grown in Kolar and Bangalore districts under irrigated conditions.

Soil requirements

Potato prefers sandy or medium loam soils rich in organic matter content.
The soil of the seed bed should be loose, friable, well aerated with good drainage.
Light textured soils having friable soil structure and high humus content tend to promote more uniform soil temperature and better aeration which favour tuber development and harvesting becomes easier.

Most favourable soil pH should be between 5 - 7.0 as the crop does not grow well in alkaline soils and under highly acidic conditions it suffers from scab disease.

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Karnataka

Potato

About Potato

History

Morphology

Potato Management

Services Overview

The key services offered by Ikisan are:

System study, design and development of IT enabled solutions and services for the agri sector.

Execution of rural IT enabled projects on BOT/BOOT/Turnkey basis.

Development, Customization and Deployment of Ikisan's IPR protected software applications.

Providing support services and best management practices for augmenting the marketing development efforts of the groups agricultural input companies (NFCL and NACL).

Development and Dissemination of best practice and information though a unique multi lingual knowledge website for the agri sector.

Some of the key customers/partners that benefit significantly from our work include are Electronics Corporation of India Ltd, State Agricultural Marketing Boards, Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture, Tamil Nadu, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Motorola Mobility (GOOGLE) etc.

As highlighted earlier Ikisan provides significant support to the market development and marketing efforts of NFCL and NACL by providing best practices and information across the agricultural input value chain - weather, soil, seeds, fertilizers, water, pesticides, output prices etc. that have enabled the companies to develop deep customer relationships and in turn enable them to grow above market growth rates. Recently example in fertilizers includes the development of Customized Fertilizer Grades (for NFCL across India that are crop and location specific have not only reduced the current consumption of fertilizers of farmers but have significantly enhanced crop yields and farmer incomes) that are expected to add significant revenues to the company.

Currently, agriculture value chain is driven by technical expertise. However, there is a lack of adequate Management knowledge and skills amongst the professionals. Therefore, Ikisan and XLRI, Jamshedpur have jointly developed an Agri Business Management Program for Agri-professionals and students. Ikisan provides the domain expertise while XLRI provides pedagogy. This program is a combination of virtual learning and campus based module at XLRI, Jamshedpur. This program has been highly appreciated.

Intellectual Property Rights for many software applications such as Field Manager, Vyapar, Mandi, Quick Solutions Systems, Management Time Table, Agri Information System and Agrecommerz belong to Ikisan. A significant recent development in this area is the introduction of Weather Based Crop Insurance. This entails setting up of Automatic Weather Stations, which provide dynamic village-level data essential for settlement of weather based insurance claims.