A study on the marketing of major crops grown in Gadag district of Karnataka

The various aspects of marketing of crops like chillies, groundnut and cotton have been studied in five Talukas of Gadag district of Karnataka taking 200 respondents. An effort has been made to identify and examine the problems in the various functional areas of marketing of these crops pertaining to assembling, processing, storage and warehousing, grading and trading, insurance, channels of distribution, finance, marketing costs and problems. It was found that government as well as private warehouses and APMC warehouses were used by the growers for storage. They used gunny bags for packing groundnut and chillies and bale for cotton. The responses have been identical from all the 40 respondents each in all the five Talukas of the Gadag district covered under the study. The farmers indicated more than one option since they could not avail only one of the options of storage due to inadequacy of space. The responses obtained from the 200 farmers in the 56 Talukas indicated that they preferred sales at APMC yard. Grading was generally done by the farmers themselves with the help of expert labour in case of chillies. The farmers did not insure their produce before it was sold. The sources of market information were reports of traveling salesmen, market intermediaries like wholesalers and retailers, records of business etc. Information obtained through personal interview with the farmers revealed that the main sources of market information were commission agents, APMC, newspapers, radio and TV. All the farmers were not satisfied with the present system of price fixing for their produce.