Agriculture TBC

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a great way for farmers and consumers to connect. The demand for fresh local food is growing steadily; there’s never been a better time to start market gardening. Learn how to start your own CSA and grow an income from your garden.

What is Community Supported Agriculture?

In the CSA model, customers support the farmer by buying a share of vegetables from her market garden. Customers often pay in advance for the season; this early cash flow provides start up capital for the farmer to buy seeds and supplies. In this model the CSA farmer can launch a market garden with little capital of her own.

What is the benefit to the consumer?

Customers of the CSA benefit by receiving a weekly share of fresh, natural food, often delivered right to their door. They also benefit from the knowledge they are supporting local food and local farmers, and reducing the ‘food miles’ that most produce travels before it reaches the consumer. Finally, the consumer is connecting back to the real source of all food, the soil. Many CSA customers feel a sense of ownership as they support their farm.

How to get started in Community Supported Agriculture

Step one is to set some goals for your CSA garden. How much money do you expect to make from your garden? Do you expect to make a part time income, or will your CSA be your main source of income for the season?

Once you have set an income target, you need to determine a price for your CSA shares, and the number of customers you will need to reach your target. For example, if you plan to make $10,000 from your garden, and you think that $500 per share is a fair price for your produce, then you will need to find 20 customers to meet your income goal. You can determine a price per share by surveying other CSA farms in your area, and comparing their offerings and prices. You can also estimate fair price by determining how much of each vegetable you plan to include in the share, and researching to find out an average price for each one.

Finding customers for your Community Supported Agriculture market garden

The first step in marketing your garden is to reach out to your warm market. Talk to your friends, family, co-workers, golf buddies, car poolers, in short everybody, and tell them you will be growing delicious, fresh vegetables in limited quantities, and if they hurry they can get on the list to get some. If they are interested, sign them up and accept a payment to help finance your garden.

If your warm market can’t fulfill your target for customers, then you have to find another source. Mail out flyers are a good way to target a specific area to find more customers. Find a neighborhood within your delivery distance, and send each home a flyer describing your garden and the benefits of your CSA program. If you write a good, compelling flyer, you can expect to receive about a 1% response rate. In other words, if you send out 1,000 flyers you will net about 10 customers. Repeat the mailing in other close neighborhoods until you reach your target.

Planning your Community Supported Agriculture market garden

Once you have confirmed how many customers you have, you now need to plan and schedule your garden to grow the vegetables for them. One of the big advantages of Community Supported Agriculture is that you know exactly how many customers you have, and therefore you can plan your market garden to be quite efficient. You will need to know your last spring frost date and your first fall frost date to plan your growing schedule. You also need to know how long each vegetable takes to mature, how much it yields, and how often you need to replant to keep a continuous harvest coming.

For example, if you have 20 customers, and each customer expects to receive one head of lettuce per week, then you know you need to harvest at least that many lettuces each week. If lettuce takes 50 days to grow to maturity, and needs one square foot of space to grow, you can figure out when to start the plants, and how much space in total you will need. You carry out this calculation for each crop you plan to grow.

Growing your Community Supported Agriculture market garden

A successful market garden requires regular attention to survive and thrive. You need to take all reasonable effort to grow and protect your crops; your customers are counting on you to bring them fresh vegetables each week. You should plant more than one variety of each vegetable, and make multiple plantings at short intervals to protect against crop failure. Grow disease resistant varieties whenever possible. Raised beds can protect against heavy rains and flooding, and drip irrigation will protect against drought. Floating row cover will provide a physical barrier against insects, and will protect young plants from cold and wind.

Starting a Community Supported Agriculture market garden is a great business you can start for very little cash. If you are successful you can grow from a part-time to a very good full time income with CSA.

Indian Agriculture Machinery
Agriculture in India, the most excellent sector of the economy, is the resource of livelihood of almost two thirds of the workforce in the country. The contribution of agriculture and allied activities to India’s economic growth in recent years has been no less momentous than that of industry and services. “If agriculture survives, India survives”. Agricultural machinery and equipment have revolutionized the agricultural industry global. They help in increasing and improving the productivity content to a great level. Other country’s peopleare generally saysthast India is an agricultural country. For agriculture India uses many types of the machinery used for to farm like tractor, cultivator, huffing, plough, electric plough, hydraulic plough,etc
List of agricultural machinery and equipment are as follows

Tractors:
Tractor is a vehicle specifically designed to deliver a high tractive effort at slow speeds, for the purposes of hauling a trailer or machinery used in agriculture or construction. It is used specially as a farm vehicle. Agricultural implements may be towed behind or mounted on the tractor, and the tractor may also provide a source of power if the implement is mechanized.

Cultivators:
Cultivator is a large farm machine used for cultivation. This farm implement is used for thrilling and pulverize the soil for planting, or for weed control or moisture conservation. It is also used in mixing compost and fertilizer into the soil.
This farm implement or machine is designed to destroy weeds with shallow roots and to break up surface soil near plants for aeration. Cultivator also eliminates habitat for mice, other rodents, insects, etc.

Garden Cultivators:
Garden Cultivators are used in maintaining gardens, though the smaller variant is used for this purpose. This motor powered machine is used to mix soils with manures and fertilizers in preparation for planting. It is controlled by an operator walking behind and also used in ploughing the soil.

Farm Cultivators:
In agriculture farms, tractor powered cultivators are used for soil’s stirring and pulverizing. They vary greatly in their size and shape, ranging from 10 feet (3 m) to the huge 80 feet (24 m). The large cultivators are equipped with hydraulic wings that fold up to makes road travel easier and safer.

Other machinery is as follows:
Tillers
Oilseed Processing Machinery
Leveling Blade
Grain Drilling Machinery
Harvesting Machinery
Sprayers
Harrow
Tractor Spares
Sowing and Planting Machinery
Planters
Hand Tools
Ploughs
Crop Processing Machinery
Crop Drying Machinery

Agriculture sector has undergone quite a transformation in the past decade or so. The rapid advancement in technology has had a subsequent impact on this sector too. This impact is visible in the increased use of hi-tech farming machinery and top-of-the-range Agriculture Implements. With the rapid growth of human population in the last two centuries, agricultural production has also increased exponentially. Now this would not have been possible without advanced Agriculture Implements. There are many types of Agriculture Implements available in the market.

Benefits Of Agriculture Implements
Agricultural Implements came as a replacement to traditional methods and handmade equipment.
Agriculture Implements have tremendously reduced the requirement of manpower.
These implements therefore have made farming a faster process than it used to be earlier. They are highly efficient.
With advanced Agriculture Implements, tasks like drenching, sowing, etc. can be done over a wide area. Agriculture Implements are very easy to use.
Day-to-day technological developments have led to innovative concepts and new designs in Agriculture Implements.
From cutting to processing of crops, all are done in a comparatively short span of time with the use of Agriculture Implements.
Irrigating the fields with Agriculture Implements ensure complete and equal irrigation, even if it is done over a very large area.
Agriculture Implements make the whole process of farming very easy and comparatively faster.
Using Agriculture Implements enables one to greatly increase the rate as well as amount of production.

Well, Agriculture Implements is a very wide category; it can, in fact, refer to the whole set of agriculture machinery. The list of all Agriculture Implements is very long but some of the commonly used Agriculture Implements are:
.Hydraulic Tubes
.Chisel plow
.Rotator
.Spike harrow and Drag harrow
.Sprayer
.GI Pipes

Based in Chandigarh, India, Bhartiya Manufacturing Industries is a, 1982 established, reputed Manufacturer and Supplier of Agriculture Implements. It is also a leading ERW Pipe Manufacturer In India. Some of the other widely used products of the company are MS Rectangular Pipes, Precision Tubes, Hydraulic Tubes, Seamless Boiler Tubes, Fuel Injection Pipes, Alloy Steel Pipes, Bush Rings, Stainless Steel Pipes, Agriculture Implements, Lancing Pipe and Rectangular Steel Tubes. All the products of Bhartiya Manufacturing Industries are reasonably priced. For further information of the company or to know in details about the products, one can go the website www.bmipipes.in.

The practice of agriculture product manufacturersagriculture is also known as “farming”, while scientists, inventors and others devoted to improving farming methods and implements are also said to be engaged in agriculture. Subsistence farming, who farms a small area with limited resource inputs, and produces only enough food to meet the needs of his/her family.
At the other end is commercial intensive agriculture, including industrial agriculture.
Such farming involves large fields and/or numbers of animals, large resource inputs (pesticides, fertilizers, etc.), and a high level of mechanization.
These operations generally attempt to maximize financial income from grain, produce, or livestock. Modern agriculture extends well beyond the traditional production of food for humans and animal feeds.
Other agricultural production goods include timber, fertilizers, animal hides, leather, industrial chemicals (starch, sugar, alcohols and resins), fibers (cotton, wool, hemp, silk and flax), fuels (methane from biomass, ethanol, biodiesel), cut flowers, ornamental and nursery plants, tropical fish and birds for the pet trade, and both legal and illegal drugs (biopharmaceuticals, tobacco, marijuana, opium, cocaine). The 20th Century saw massive changes in agricultural practice, particularly in agricultural chemistry.
Agricultural chemistry includes the application of chemical fertilizer, chemical insecticides, and chemical fungicides, soil makeup, analysis of agricultural products, and nutritional needs of farm animals.
Beginning in the Western world, the green revolution spread many of these changes to farms throughout the world, with varying success. Other recent changes in agriculture include hydroponics, plant breeding, hybridization, gene manipulation, better management of soil nutrients, and improved weed control.
Genetic engineering has yielded crops which have capabilities beyond those of naturally occuring plants, such as higher yields and disease resistance.
Modified seeds germinate faster, and thus can be grown in an extended growing area.agriculture product suppliers
Genetic engineering of plants has proven controversial, particularly in the case of herbicide-resistant plants. As of 2006, an estimated 36 percent of the world’s workers are employed in agriculture (down from 42% in 1996), making it by far the most common occupation.
However, the relative significance of farming has dropped steadily since the beginning of industrialization, and in 2006 for the first time in history the services sector overtook agriculture as the economic sector employing the most people worldwide.
Also, agricultural production accounts for less than five percent of the gross world product (an aggregate of all gross domestic products).

Cracking a competitive exam turns easy when you are provided with right study materials on right time. This on the other hand is failed to be achieved by millions of students appearing for various competitive exams of banks, civil services, IBPS, TOEFL or other government examinations. In the syllabus of public services examinations, questions on physical geography of india and agriculture gk form a vital part of examinations.

Physical Geography of India
Geography is one of the main electives that are selected by a large number of students to crack the exams. There are two patterns of questions that are asked in physical geography question paper. First, multiple choice questions (MCQs) and other includes descriptive questions that are answered in passages. For MCQs on physical geography of india accuracy matters the most while for the latter conciseness and knowledge. The same applies for agriculture gk as well. GK and Agricultural questions are prepared as per various difficulty levels.

Questions on Agriculture GK
General knowledge on agricultural issues covers all major issues of forests, soils, trees, rivers, earth, crops, fertilizers etc. Again the questions are classified into two categories of objective and descriptive type questions.

Natural Regions of India
Natural Regions of India cover large and small geographical regions including The Himalayas, Sutlej-Ganga plains, Eastern and Western Ghat plains, tundra region, warm-temperate zones.

Climate
Climate is the most vital part of physical geography of india that questions are asked compulsorily in multiple choice and descriptive questions. Climate covers major questions of equator distances, ocean currents, land slopes, mountain directors, soil nature, composition, testing, and fertility.
Questions on Planning in Indian Economy
Questions on planning in indian economy cover working methodologies of Planning Commission of India. Five-Year Plans, Per Capita Income, Agricultural Produce, Taxation and many such other topics. The questions comprise both MCQs and descriptive questions. The attendants are to answer both with the firm focus on accuracy and conciseness of the topic. Students can be asked any kind of questions from lower difficulty level to higher difficulty level in both descriptive and MCQs.

Five Year Plans
Questions on five year plans are must. These form majority share on Indian economy and world economy as well. Sometimes you might be given a passage and you have to read, comprehend and write the answer of questions provided below the passage.

How to Prepare for Planning in Indian Economy
Obtain full knowledge (Basic and Advanced) then read it with regular practice. Once you have full knowledge over it take online tests and assess your knowledge on the same.