Department of Agricultural Economics, CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar-125 004, Haryana.
This case study on diversification towards commercial farming has been conducted in Bamla village of Bhiwani district in Haryana state. It is about the spectacular progress made by the farmer named Shri Vikram Singh by converting his farm from traditional unit to commercial venture on the advice of the scientists of CCS, HAU and KVK, Bhiwani. His gross returns have been found to be Rs 4,06,872 by incurring the total cost of Rs 2,03,896. The benefit-cost ratio of 1:2.0 indicates that he has improved his earnings from merely twenty-one paisa on investment of one rupee to Rs 2, after introducing commercial crops of vegetables and fruits. He has registered an increase of about 315 per cent in gross returns and 1093 per cent in net returns, by increasing total cost by 152 per cent and operating cost by 219 per cent. The costs as well as returns per unit of cropped area and operational holding have increased many folds after commercialization of farming over traditional farming. The cost of production has also come down due to improvement in productivity of almost all the crops. This has been largely attributed to diversification towards commercial crops like fruits and vegetables in combination with adoption of improved technology suggested by the university scientists. Thus, the diversified farming towards commercial and exportoriented crops can make the agriculture an economically viable enterprise. There is a need to demonstrate such success stories to a large number of farmers. Incentives need to be provided to such farmers to encourage diversification towards commercial and export-oriented crops to make our agri-products competitive in the international market under the WTO regime.
