Youth Speaker entry #56: Nikki Chaudhary (India)

I am Nikki Pilania Chaudhary from India.

I am a practicing farmer involved in poplar based agro forestry and dairy farming at our farm in village of North West Indian State Uttar Pradesh . I am also working to promote agro forestry and dairy among farmers in my state.

At our farm we have planted about 12,000 poplar trees and 1000 eucalyptus trees of high genetic potential and I manage our dairy unit of 50 cows producing 500 litres of milk per day.

Diversification of agriculture to agro forestry and dairy farming is very interesting as the combination not only gives attractive economic returns but also benefits our environment.

Poplar agro forestry promotes tree cover on farms; its leaf litter adds to soil fertility and these trees meet timber requirements of industries producing plywood, paper, matchsticks etc.

On small farms I, encourage boundary plantations of trees and on lands prone to water logging eucalyptus plantation is encouraged.

In my interaction with farmers I realised that although lot of farmers were growing poplar trees but because of lack of knowledge on right tree management practices they were not able to take good timber volume per tree at harvest and hence realised lower returns.

So, I started awaring farmers on practices that must be adopted by them to raise good plantation stock by interacting with them in farmers gathering at our association meetings and by distributing pamphlets informing package of practices to raise valuable trees.

Promoting tree cover is one part but in order to feed our growing population it is essential that productive, diversified and sustainable agriculture grows at an accelerated pace.

Some agriculture sub sectors such as dairy farming have huge potential for expansion.
Improvement in milk production per animal through improvement in cow genetics, good nutrition etc will not only boost farmers income but also meet growing demand of milk and milk products of our rising population.

To promote dairy I along with my husband Gaurav founded Progressive Dairy Farmers Association (Registered) Uttar Pradesh in 2012. Since then we have been holding farmers gathering every two months where dairy experts are called to give presentation on various aspects of cattle management such as breeding, feeding, cattle housing, calf raising etc.

Through Association Meetings there has been significant improvement in farmers’ knowledge on running a dairy unit profitably.

I am working my best to make agriculture attractive to farmers and our young people by developing solutions to improve farm productivity, increasing agriculture sustainability, modernising agriculture and promoting farm sourced food products.

I hope to transform agriculture through technology innovation impacting lives of farmers and rural communities.

Agriculture Rocks – Green Business is a facebook group that I have created to fight negative image that our youth carry about agriculture.

Text, photo and video are submitted by Nikki Chaudhary (India) – chaudharyfarms(at)gmail.com

The content, structure and grammar is at the discretion of the author only.

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This post is published as an application by the author, to speak as a youth representative at the World Forestry Congress. Have a look at the other entries too!

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