Rice is a type of grass that belongs to a family Poaceae in which includes other cereals like wheat and corn. The production of rice in Pakistan is an average about 6 million tons each year.
Rice is grown across the world. Pakistan is the fourth largest exporter of rice in the world.Most of the rice cultivated in Punjab and Sindh region with the millions of farmers relying on the rice cultivation that is most important source of employment.
There are many varieties of rice and different ways of their cultivation. Rice is most commonly consumed staple food of all the worlds’ human population. It provides the dietary energy, vitamins, and proteins. In Pakistan, every household spends an average 3.8% expenditure on rice and its flour.
In eastern states, the rice growing area is more or large but these areas facing many constraints in production like irrigation problems, drought and that is not enough to counteract hazards exist by vagaries of monsoon. While, the cultivation with poor management package of practice is completely depended on monsoon.
In the regions having low rainfall, crops face the deficiency of zinc and iron in the soil. In the regions of high rainfall, diseases break out mostly due to unbalance nutrients availability in the soil like Helminthosporium.
The investment of fertilizer becomes chancy in these soils because the plant nutrients applied from the fertilizers are lost fast. Global warming may also have expected to harm the rice production. In many Asian countries, the chance of increasing the rice is nearly exhausted. In mostly areas, the highly productive rice land has damaged to be industries and housing development process.
Seed bed preparation is the factor that may causes low productivity of rice. For utmost and uniform seed germination, the fine seedbed is necessary that contribute in good crop harvest. Unevenly, the problems created by seedbed like salinity, water logging, moisture and loss of nutrients. For uniform and fine seedbed, it is necessary to use standard number of cultivation and ploughings.
Agricultural soils contain very low organic matter. In addition, nutrient deficiency is widely reported because of harvesting of exhaustive crops year after year, high temperature, low-rainfall, high-cost and imbalanced use of fertilizers.
\Application of fertilizers in a balanced amount with standard methods and at appropriate time keeping in mind the soil nutrient status, soil moisture, crop type and crop growth stage can increase yield by 25-75 per cent.
Moreover, low plant density, poor seed quality and deficient moisture from seedbed and coarse seedbed are responsible for it. Weeds, pests, insects and diseases may reduce the yield up to 20% or more throughout from the pre-and post-harvest duration. To keep the population of pests and insects control, farmers are forced to be using the pesticides and insecticides.
Lack of education, adulteration and high cost, lack of quality control and timely unavailability the use of imperfect equipment’s by inexperienced labors are the major constraint of responsible for the incompetence of pesticides. For the low yield, there are many physical causes. Shortage of water is the major cause of low productivity of rice. The irrigation water supplied to the crops does not meet the needs for optimum yield.
The volume of water for the crop needs supply is not coordinated with the time pattern. To bring on an agronomic revolution in Asian rice production to decrease existing gaps between actual and potential yield.
In irrigated environment using better crop practices and managements for yield, improvements can be achieved. Enhance the deliverance of new post-harvest technologies to decrease the losses. Post harvests include the drying, storing processes of rice.
The Market system for agricultural reap wreaked with an unending of issues. It is obsolete, the agriculturists are not making genuine benefits on their produce because of uneven market system.
Absence of direct market access for ranchers because of overwhelming association of state-run purchasing offices has likewise thwarted development of agricultural area. There is a need of market-arranged changes for wide based maintained development in cultivate profitability.
Lessening area and water assets, stagnation in the yield of real harvests, badly prepared labor work, poor foundation, inefficient water system strategies, conventional cultivating methods, unbalanced market system or more all ramifications of WTO administration are fundamental issues and difficulties confronting an obsolete farming segment.
This article is collectively authored by Saba Durrani*. Shakeel Ahmad Anjum, Nadeem Akbar, Muhammad Ishfaq
University of Agriculture, Faisalabad.