Hyderabad: In Telangana, farmers are always heroes.
And here is one who has repeatedly proved to be one. Chintala Venkat Reddy, a pucca Hyderabadi and Padma Shri awardee who already has patents for his soil management techniques and the mud spray technology that helped the country tackle the recent locust attack, is opening the doors on what could be yet another revolutionary farming technique.
The technique, which has been patented with the official confirmation reaching Reddy on Thursday, ensures the presence of the crucial Vitamin D in rice and wheat in a completely natural way. Normal or conventional rice and wheat have little or no presence of Vitamin D, sometimes called the sunshine vitamin, but Venkat Reddy through his innovative farming methods has got rice that has the presence of the vitamin ranging from 102 international units (IU) per 100 gram to 141 IU per 100 g.
For wheat, his experiments on an agricultural plot in front of his home in Alwal came up with 1606 IU per 100g and 1832 IU per 100 g. This variety of rice and wheat, which Venkat Reddy is cultivating on his farm, can be the answer to the dilemma of malnutrition and search for a proper vitamin supplement that several scientific institutions and countries have been looking for, he feels.
The secret to the enriched rice and wheat is a formulation that Venkat Reddy has devised on his own and is using on the crops during the most critical period, i.e., from the flowering to the seed setting stage, and that too, using simple irrigation techniques.
“If the Government of India wants it to be simplified and given to farmers, I’m ready to help,” says the 70-year-old, adding that if the government was not interested, he would give it to multinational companies who can then mass produce the enriched variety, the absence of which prompts many to go for artificial Vitamin D supplements, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic to improve their immunity.
Always a trailblazer
Chintala Venkat Reddy has always walked a little far from conventional farming methods. He first made news about 15 years ago, when he came up with the idea of replacing the topsoil with soil from a depth of four feet to restore fertility while cultivating paddy. He adapted a similar technique to keep away pests as well.
What he did was quite simple. He dug out the subsoil, dried it, and then mixed it with water before letting it settle down. And then, using regular farm spraying techniques, sprayed the solution in his grape garden. The move had three impacts. One was that pests and insects, which breathe through their skin, found it impossible to breathe because of the soil solution that covered them. And for those that were planning to attack the plants, the soil solution was a cover that they couldn’t pierce through. The third was that the plants absorbed all the nutrients in the subsoil and used them to flourish. The soil dug from four feet below was also dried and used as manure, applied at the root zone of the plants.
This soil solution from Reddy (9866883336) was used across the country to thwart locusts during the recent calamity. Reddy is part of several WhatsApp groups which have farmers from across the country and always shares his innovative soil management techniques to help others reap better results from organic farming.
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