3-Mat Nursery: A Profitable Venture
Transcript
We have developed a seedling factory on renters’ model through which farmers get seedling and rice transplanter services. Farmers are able to save time, money and their yield also increases.
You can see over here a seedling factory is at work. Just like this, around 35 farmers’ groups or clubs are growing seedlings in our district. It is our business model and we sell seedlings to the farmers. The farmers are also able to save time.
Over here is a 4 feet wide seed bed. We prepare the bed with soil and organic matter. We mix 20% organic fertilizer with soil and then screen and separate the dust and transfer this soil to the seed bed where we do seeding.
After preparing the soil, we place a plastic on the seed bed. These are mat seedlings and it requires plastic.
You can see our workers are at work. This soil has 20% organic stuff and the rest 80% is soil. We mix them and prepare a seed bed with them. The seeds are used to grow seedlings. Once the seedlings are ready, we cut it in 1×2 feet layers and transport them in a tray to farmers.
You can see the seed bed is ready after which we provide water and do the seed sowing.
You can see the seed sowing is taking place. This is the seeder machine and it does sowing in a uniform manner on the mat seedling bed for the rice transplanter machine.
After seed sowing, we spray fresh water to increase the moisture. We also cover the mixture of organic fertilizer and soil. Once the entire process is complete, we give it plastic and keep it like that for 17 to 18 days. We remove the plastic after 3 to 4 days when we have to take out the seeds. We do this because of the cold. After 13 to 14 days we open it up.
You can see that the seedling is ready after 13 to 14 days. We will cut it and transport it in trays to the farm.
You can see we are putting the seedlings that germinated on plastic on the trays.
We require 60 trays for an acre of land. It cost 2400 rupees per acre to the farmer for seedlings. If the farmer does traditional transplanting then, only for seedlings, it would cost him around 4500 rupees per acre. So the farmer is able to save time and money with this technique.
Once we bring the rice seedlings that we developed in our seedling factory, we provide service to the farmers in their farm. We set the seedlings in the transplanter machine for transplanting.
