Uttar Pradesh: Horticulture | Course for UPPSC Preparation - UPPSC (UP) PDF Download

Introduction

• Horticulture is the science and art of producing, improving, marketing, and using fruits, vegetables, flowers, and ornamental plants.
• The importance of horticulture in improving the productivity of land, generating employment, improving economic conditions of the farmers and entrepreneurs, enhancing exports and, above all, providing nutritional security to the people, is widely acknowledged.

Development of Horticulture in Uttar Pradesh has been restricted by following factors:

• Poor quality produce
• Lac of good quality seeds
• Threshing in unhygienic conditions
• Poor market intelligence
• Lac of market information to divert  produce to desirable markets
• No estimates available for exports of spices, Kinow, Heena, Isagol
• Lac of certification
• Unawareness about Sanitary & Phyto sanitary standards
• Organic certification
• Poor PHM Infrastructure
•  Limited facilities for grading,  sorting & packaging
• Inappropriate transport facilities for erishables
• Poor Mandi infrastructure
• Lack of net work of rural/ local markets
• Lac of perishable cargo centre

Fluctuations in area & prod. due to frequent drought conditions, Its need of the hour to bring stability through rain water harvesting based fruit plantations having drought proofing power.
Main objectives of the Horticulture promotions in Uttar Pradesh are:

• For improvement in production and quality of horticultural crops its important to promote present modern techniques among farmers and motivate them to adopt it.
• With less labour and less investment we should provide more benefit to the producers by deepening and changing in crop-cycle.
• According to scientific recommendations important investments should be timely and scientifically used.
• To form primary horticultural cooperative committees and make the effective for providing reasonable price of horticultural crops and store for regular supply, to improvise legislation and marketing facilities.
• To provide short term and long term training in fruit and vegetable conservation, cookery, bakery, food processing, mushroom and bee keeping so and promote cottage industry and organise programs for betel development.
• To find out problems in horticultural technology and make experimental results public.
• To train serving officers/employees and farmers with modernized techniques and to implement it on them.
• To provide overall development to horticulture sector through area based strategy, in which management, processing and marketing after research, technical promotion, expansion, harvesting is included, by adapting agricultural season features.

Horticulture has been the ideal option for diversification in agriculture making way in heralding Golden Revolution.  The scenario, which has proved the potential of horticulture in agribusiness, has encouraged the private sector activities and in this context, quality management has become important.
The demand for increasing the production and productivity is further expected to rise in the coming years on account of need to provide minimum per capita requirements of various horticulture commodities to the increasing population to ensure nutritional security.  With emphasis on value addition, the demand of crop products of several commodities for the processing industries will increase. Change in dietary pattern and rise in per capita income and living style is expected to accelerate the demand for horticultural commodities especially that of processed products.