Find out the constraints faced by wheat growers and provide suggestions for adaptation to soil health card

Introduction

Soil Health Management is one of the critical components under National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA). It aims at judicious and responsible use of chemical fertilizers on farms maintaining micro and macro nutrients of soil. "The Soil Health Card Scheme was launched in India on February 19, 2015 at Suratgarh, Rajasthan (Bisariya et al 2023) and is a flagship program by the Department of Agriculture and Co-operation under the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India. Under the programme, farmers receive soil health cards (SHCs) from the government which includes nutritional status of soil crop-specific recommendations for the nutrients and fertilisers needed for every individual land holding. The goal of this is to assist farmers in increasing output by using inputs judiciously. The Soil Health Card Scheme offers a qualitative evaluation of soil health by collecting soil samples & testing the vital parameters and the necessary reclamation actions for soils which cause problems." (Rani et al 2024) [9] SHC contains the status of soil with respect to 12 parameters: • N, P, K(Macro-nutrients)

• S (Secondary-nutrients) • Zn, Fe, Cu, Mn, Br (Micro-nutrients) • pH, EC, OC (Physical parameters) (https://www.sciencedirect.com 2025)

"Soil testing is a great tool to assess soil fertility and nutrient supplying capacity. The most crucial step in the whole programme is timely reporting of soil test results to the farmers. Speed and process should be reliable. Operation is also most important, the system and process should be in place for effective implementation of the scheme and to get accurate result soil health card is given to every individual farmer to use inorganic fertilizer based on soil test values to lower production cost, increase profits and maintain the soil health. Soil health card lays more focus on chemical nutrient indicators, whereas physical and biological properties are not included" (Kumari et al 2022) [7] . "Adopting sustainable soil fertility management (SFM) practices is necessary to achieve sustainable agricultural production" (Chowdary et al., 2018; Kapoor et al., 2021) [2,4] . The question here is how many farmers are using SFM practices. In fact, the majority of the farmers use either sub or supra-optimal levels of chemical fertilizers which result in declined soil health and inherent soil fertility. In www.extensionjournal.com accordance with the survey conducted by Kumar et al., (2021) [5] revealed that knowledge level and adoption of SFM are relatively much less i.e., only eight percent of the farmers are aware of it. "There is a need for strengthening the Soil Health Card related extension services to provide better advisories. The scheme has a poor backing of infrastructure and human resources, with significant gaps. Although some southern and western states performed better, in some states even the allocated resources are not being spent or utilized due to lack of capacities. This should be of high priority in the immediate future" (Reddy 2017 and Reddy 2019) [10,11] . Soil Health Card scheme is one such launched by the Government (Bisarya et al., 2023) [1] . Keeping the above facts in view a study was framed to find out the constraints faced by wheat growers and provide suggestions for adaptation Soil Health Card.

Materials and Methods

An ex-post-facto investigation was carried out in the purposively selected Patan block of Jabalpur district of Madhya Pradesh because it had the maximum number of Soil Health Card users. Patan block comprises of 224 village, out of which 10 villages namely Bhautiya, Chandwa, Goppur, Gwari, Jarond, Karondi, Katila, Jamkhar, Amarpur, and Hirapur were selected purposively on the basis of the maximum number of SHC holder & wheat growers. The respondents from the selected villages were chosen on the basis of proportionate percentage (10%) distribution and make population size 120 (Table 1). Find out the constraints faced by wheat growers for adaptation to Soil Health Card at time of investigation. A constraint index was developed to measure constraints of respondents which they experienced for adaptation to soil health card. Appropriate statistical tools were used for data analysis. Responses were tabulated separately by using frequency and percentage and based on this the problems were ranked the basis of frequency shown in Table 2 and Table 3. Some useful suggestions provided to respondents, majority (95.83%) of respondent is accepted that soil testing laboratory should be established at Taluka level with highly qualified supporting staff (Rank I), 91.66% accepted that farmer should be trained to take soil sample of its own soil (Rank II), 88.33% accepted that recommend such fertilizers which are available in the market (Rank III), 86.66% accepted that extension workers should be always be present (Rank IV), and 63.33 accepted that SHC should be issued prior to crop season (Rank V).

References

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