Pink bollworm in cotton, a solution from the farm itself

Off-season management: converting freshly harvested cotton sticks into fine chips + adding cow dung = Cow dung logs (a product that farmer can sell and generate extra income)

off season management for pink bollworm in india & pakistan

Let’s start with the pink bollworm issue in cotton in Asia Pacific. As it is a monophagous pest and hibernate in double seed cotton. The general recommendations: not to stack the cotton sticks, weekly move them around, and burn the sticks as quickly as possible.

Limitations: it’s a year long fuel for the farmers and can not be disposed off. Moving the huge stack of sticks every week is painstaking.

In India, someone has designed a cow dung log machine. Where ‘cow dung’ a waste from cows is mixed with wheat straw and turned into long hollow pipes,. Dried and used as fuel.

TAILORED SOLUTION:

We have to incentivize the farmers for tailored solution and to develop products from their own ecosystem. Any crop waste should be turned into a working product with minimum input cost. Each agricultural farm has a wood shredder with fine steel screen (fine coarse 0.375 in), the freshly harvested cotton sticks shredded immediately with all left over unopened-bolls, will tackle two things;

1: the PBW hibernating in the double seed in the un-opened boll will be destroyed.

2: fine chopped material can be added to the cow dung and converted to logs. It will increase the weight of the log, fetch more price as well as will burn better.

This is the convenient & practically possible solution, where farmer can generate an additional product from his ecosystem and can earn extra money. It will take care of the un-opened bolls and mitigate the PBW hibernating larvae.

We will encourage farmer to generate this product and help himself. For video please click this link.