Natioanl Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning, Regional Centre, Hebbal, Bangalore-560 024, Karnataka.
Vermicomposting is gaining strong foothold among the farmers of Maharshtra due to its multifunctional roles and benefits in agriculture. The production and usage studies on vermicompost carried out under the Institute-Village Linkage Programme near Nagpur, Maharashtra, have clearly indicated that there is lot of scope to undertake vermicomposting as an agribusiness opportunity to meet its growing demand, especially in citrus crops. Vermicompost application has been found to improve the yield of citrus by 21 per cent, with B: C ratio of 3.21. The adoption rate has increased from 3 per cent to 28 per cent over five years. Economic analysis of vermicompost production under heap system has revealed that a farmer can get around Rs 46,000 net profit besides 33 human-days work per ha of citrus cultivation as additional employment. The rate of return of vermicompost has worked out to be 2.92. The economic viability of vermicompost production and its application to citrus has been estimated for Maharashtra, which has revealed a need of around 15.6 Mt of vermicompost, which will generate a net profit of around Rs 13 crores per annum by 2015. The study has projected that the additional net economic benefits by adopting vermicompost technology in citrus by the year 2015 will be of Rs 24.6 crores.
