An Appraisal of Potato Seed Production Practices Adopted by the Farmers of Punjab

A sample of 180 respondents comprising 90 organised and 90 unorganised potato seed growers were selected from a cluster of three major potato seed producing districts of Punjab viz. Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur and Kapurthala with the aim to determine the extent of adoption of potato production technologies by them. The study revealed that majority of the respondents had adopted recommended varieties, seed rate and seed treatment of potato, but used wider plant spacing than the recommended. Extent of urea applied by unorganised respondents exceeds that of organised farmers, however organised respondents applied 16.1 per cent more DAP in comparison to unorganised respondents. Date of planting and dehaulming are important practices which determine the virus free seed quality and appropriate size of the seed tubers. Organised seed potato producers planted and dehaulmed their crop at recommended date, while majority of unorganised respondents (55.56%) performed dehaulming at later stage of crop. It was found that organised and unorganised farmers usually rogued out unhealthy plants once and did not differ in the average time of earthing up operation in their crop. Majority of the respondents expressed their ability to identify the symptoms of virus in potato crop. In comparison to their counterparts, organised respondents applied a greater number of insecticide (1.82) and fungicide (2.06) sprays to produce virus and disease-free potato seed. Organised potato seed producers usually graded their produce for distant markets of other states and were not much dependent on middleman for selling their produce. Study emphasise further strengthening of farmer to farmer and research-extension-farmer linkages to bridge adoption gaps in quality potato seed production.