Contract farming of floriculture in Punjab - problems and prospects

Five companies engaged in the business of flower seed production through contract farming and farmers (72) having contractual arrangements with these contracting agencies were selected as the respondents. The analysis of data from farmers and contracting agencies indicated that contract farming of floriculture has been beneficial to both the farmer as well as contracting agencies. Contracting agencies provided seed, technical know-how, supervision, different agrochemicals, and credit facilities to the farmers with a buy back-oral agreement. Farmers growing flower for seed production under the umbrella of contract farming showed their satisfaction about the facilities provided by the contracting agencies. Income from different flower ranged from about Rs. 31,364.09 for Ice plant to about Rs.84,621.63 for verbena flower per ha, while income from wheat was only Rs. 20885.41 per ha. Employment generation was much higher for different flower crops as compared to wheat. Contract farmers faced problems like labour intensive nature (80.55 %), verbal contract (63.89 %) etc. Contracting agencies faced problems like difficulty to motivate farmers to grow flowers, lack of technical know-how about flower cultivation with the farmers.