PALAKKAD: The Vegetable and Fruit Promotion Council Keralam (VFPCK) is all set to commission its own tissue culture laboratory, vegetable and fruit seedling units, besides a "seed training institute". These will be commissioned by Agriculture Minister Mullakkara Ratnakaran on November 28.
The VFPCK has used the funds from the Planning Board and the State Horticulture Mission to set up the tissue culture laboratory at Alathur.
Earlier, the VFPCK used to depend on government tissue culture labs but these were not up to the mark. The modern lab is capable of producing up to 50,000 tissue culture plants a month.
Explant initiation, multiplication and rooting stages in culturing are carried out at the laboratory on the shoot buds of suckers collected from disease-free, highyielding varieties of banana from different parts of the state. (Virusinfected suckers have been the biggest enemy of banana farmers).
The plants are then shifted to a hardening chamber for acclimatisation and development.
At the vegetable seedling unit, shade-net nurseries spread over 5,000 sq ft and capable of raising up to 2 lakh seedlings have been set up. In the first phase, cool-season varieties like cabbage and cauliflower have been taken up. In the second, saplings of capsicum, beetroot and radish are proposed to be taken up.
At the fruit seedling unit, grafted or layered seedlings are raised from genetically pure mother plants in the fields of select farmers for a period of three months.
There is also a seed training institute where live demonstration of the latest scientific practices in agriculture, including permanent pandals, drip irrigation, precision farming and cultivation under controlled environment, can be experienced. Moreover, visits to plots of seed growers, farmer-level interaction and guided tours of the processing and quality-testing facility are conducted.
With the commissioning of these units, VFPCK will become a centre of excellence in planting materials, said its chief executive officer N Vijayan.
In fact, the vegetable seed unit has been functioning here for the past 13 years. Vegetable seeds of 20 different high-yielding varieties that suit the agro-climatic conditions of the state are produced by 104 trained growers under the guidance of experts.
The seeds produced here are sold through 14 district outlets to VFPCK member-farmers, Agriculture Department, panchayats and the general public. T oday it caters to 50 per cent of the state’s demand for vegetable seeds in the organised sector.