SRINAGAR: The inauguration of two days Review Meet to assess the performance of Northern region Farm Machinery Testing Centres (FMTC’s) was held at SKUAST-K under the chairmanship ofProf. Nazir Ahmad Ganai, Vice Chancellor SKUAST-K.
The event was attended by Dr.V. N. Kale, Additional commissioner, mechanization and technology division, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer’s Welfare, GoI,Dr.Mukesh Jain, Director, NRFMTTI, Hisar, Director’s, Deans, Heads and faculty members of different divisions of SKUAST-K .At the very beginning, Prof. Jagvir Dixit, Associate Dean and PI FMTC welcomed the delegates and provided an overview of the functioning of FMTCs. Dr.Mukesh Jain, Director NRFMTTI emphasized on the role of farm machinery testing centres in providing the tested agricultural machinery to the farmers.
Dr.Sarfaraz Ahmad Wani, Director Research, highlighted the achievements of SKUAST-K including the ‘sixth best’ agricultural university in ICAR ranking, ‘Band excellent’ in ATAL ranking and ‘Grade A’ in recently released ICAR accreditation. The guest of honour Dr. V. N. Kale stressed the need to adopt standard operating procedures in testing of agricultural machinery. He focussed on the need for the certification of drones to make the technology available to the farmers.
The chief guest & Vice Chancellor, SKUAST-K laid thrust towards accelerating the pace of mechanization to increase productivity and reduce the unit cost of production of agricultural commodities. He stressed on the need of technological innovations in terms of farm mechanization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of things to save the resources and protect the environment from degradation. He lauded the performance of FMTC located at College of Agricultural Engineering and Technology in testing the machines suitable for the farmers of Jammu and Kashmir. The session concluded with the vote of thanks from Prof. J. N. Khan, Head, Division of soil and water conservation engineering, COAE&T.

KR Desk