Turmeric

Crop Establishment

Planting

Well developed healthy and disease free and scale insect free rhizomes should be selected during harvest for seed and stored in underground pits.
When the seeds start sprouting, it should be taken out from the pits for planting.
Care should be taken to protect the sprouting buds from mechanical injury.
The planting starts with commencement of monsoon.
In Tamil Nadu, planting may be done during May - June or July - August.
Whole or split mother rhizomes weighing 35 to 44 g are used for planting.
A seed rate of 2500 kg of rhizomes/ha is optimum.
Rhizomes are treated with mancozeb (3 g/lit.) and malathion (1ml/lit) for 30 minutes before planting.
Two systems of planting viz., flat beds, and ridges and furrows methods are adopted.
Small pits are made with a hand hoe in the beds in rows with a spacing of 25 x 30 cm and covered with soil or dry powdered cattle manure.
The optimum spacing in furrows and ridges is about 45 to 60 cm between the rows and 25 cm between the plants.
The optimum period of planting under Bhavanisagar conditions has been found as first week of June for higher yield. The crop planted from May 15th to June 15th was less susceptible to thrips.
The broad ridge system of planting (50 cm x 15 cm) has been found to be the best (34 t/ha) as against common ridge and furrow (28 t/ha) and flat bed (24 t/ha) systems.

Inter cropping/companion cropping

Turmeric is a long duration crop (9 months) in which a short duration crop can be cultivated as an inter crop to get a supplementary income before the main crop is harvested.
Intercropping with country onion and mulching appreciably increased the fresh rhizome yield.
Turmeric grown with K2 chillies as a border crop gave a maximum yield of 29.65 t/ha with additional chilli yield of 2938 kg/ha.
Turmeric comes up well under partial shaded conditions, but thick shade affects the yield adversely
It is recommended as an intercrop in coconut and areca nut gardens.
It can also be mixed with redgram, sunnhemp, chillies, colocasia, onion, brinjal and cereals like maize and ragi.
High returns are realised from turmeric and maize or turmeric and chillies or turmeric and castor.

Rotations

In wet lands, turmeric is rotated with rice, sugarcane, banana, etc. once in 3 or 4 years.
In garden lands, it is grown in rotation with sugarcane, chillies, onion, garlic, elephant's foot yam, vegetables, pulses, wheat, ragi and maize.
Often, castor and pigeon peas are planted on borders and on irrigation channels to provide shade.

Mulching

Mulching of turmeric with dry leaves was reported to be beneficial.
Sugrcane trash mulch was found useful in increasing the germination rate, plant height as well as rhizome yield of turmeric.
Mulching with daincha (Sesbania aculeata) leaves and sunnhemp (Crotalaria juncea) leaves was found useful in turmeric.
Mulching treatments hasten germination by a week and allow less number of weeds thereby resulting in higher rhizome yield than non-mulched treatments.
Mulching with green leaves at the rate of 12-15 t/ha immediately after planting and again after 50 days is recommended.

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Tamilnadu

Turmeric

About Turmeric

History

Morphology

Turmeric 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, Tamilnadu, 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.