Saving in Fertilizers Techniracies

If nothing but fruits are sold then the ash content of the fruits sold can be studied. In fruits, ash is less than one percent of its dry weight. That is 16 tons of grapes have 4 tons of dry weight (75% water). So one percent means about 40 kg of ash form. Accordingly we can have very little to give to the crop from. This cost will come to about 400 Rupees at the most per acre. We can have this ash content from garden weeds, thus weeds become our friends. In this method all the cutting and dead part of the vine are composted in the garden and not thrown out. In books on grape cultivation, experts recommend at least six thousand Rupees fertilizers per acre. Now about 20 thousand grape growers use these techniracies and are creating one crore Rupees worth of savings. Such basic studies in grapes help the growers to resolve their problems within their own resources. The grape growers in Maharashtra never depend on universities or government to resolve their field problems.

The above list will work as a sample on how success in grape cultivation depends on studying, evolving and using such techniracies. Grape growers in Peer Venture Net, learn more than ten thousand such techniracies, while in Gypsy Venture Nets about half of these. The other ordinary cultivators know still less and they get less crop than record crop.

The success of the scientific grape revolution (that is now having yearly turn over above six hundred crore Rupees in Indian and foreign market) is a collective ethos of grass root small farmers in the state. At one time in our "Venture nets" we tried to assess the worth of our various techniracies in terms of money value terms. It turned out even on moderate calculation to be no less than one crore Rupees worth, if the government, universities or private research institutes had to build these techniracies.

Many of the venturers in the peer venture nets have their individual libraries on grapes and related subjects worth fifty thousand Rupees or even above that and that too in spite of the fact that their knowledge in English is just at S. S. C standard. or mostly below that. The choice of the books made was very selective, mostly at graduate, postgraduate and research level. Many research papers from various agricultural universities in the world were searched, xeroxed, collected, discussed and used to solve their own problems in the fields. They would always say if they get one new clue to build new technicracies, the entire worth of whole collection was recovered. It was a genuine spirit of scientists that they yearned, earned and lived. To study Bordo mixture from original papers published anywhere in the world, they established link at Delhi, who provided such services at very high price of Rs 250 per Xerox copy. More than 100 such original Bordo mixture papers were thus collected. They then made deep study of these papers by many well planned trials and evolved various new types of Bordo's than the usually recommended Bordo. They had a new type of inverse Bordo mixture, lime water Bordo mixture and developed one as black Bordo mixture to be used for bud bursting by applying that paste to only desired buds to have uniform crop.

I am putting all of this here to emphasize that though I was lovingly called by grape growers "Drakhsa Mouli", "Prayog Mauli" I had never grown over more than few grape vine varieties and those too in small number of two or three of each variety. My real place in the scientific grape revolution was that of a Social Scientist and no way of an horticulturist. I had some successful ventures in grape cultivation studied and evolved as my own individual search & then by accident only I had come across the Tasgaon Group.