Farm machinery maker CNH has expanded its crop residue management programme to 25 locations in 11 Indian states and opened a dedicated parts warehouse in Ludhiana to keep tractors and balers running in Punjab and Haryana during the rush between paddy harvest and wheat sowing, Rural Voice reported on 30 October.
The programme, run as corporate social responsibility work, began in October 2017 in Kallar Majri village in Punjab, which the company says has stayed free of stubble burning for ten years in a row. Since then it has helped bale about 60,000 tonnes of paddy straw, keeping residue from roughly 39,900 acres from being burnt, according to CNH. The company puts the direct beneficiaries at more than 7,500 farmers and the carbon dioxide avoided at about 97,000 tonnes.
Between 3,000 and 4,000 farmers have attended demonstrations of straw management machines across the 25 locations. From Punjab the work has spread to Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Uttarakhand, and more recently to Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
The Ludhiana warehouse will run seven days a week and stock genuine parts for CNH's large tractors and balers. A GPS-tracked transport fleet is meant to get parts to most customers within 24 hours, cutting machine downtime in the short harvest window. It adds to a network of more than 600 dealers and over 1,000 customer touchpoints in India.
Narinder Mittal, president and managing director of CNH India, said timely access to machines and parts was essential if farmers are to manage straw without burning it when they have little time to prepare fields for the next crop. The company's residue portfolio includes New Holland tractors, combines, square and round balers, gyro rakes, mulchers, choppers and forage harvesters; New Holland began baling crop residue in India in 1998.
Photo: Pekachu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Rural Voice
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