Reimagining solutions to Cotton Farmers Problems: HDP Cotton may show the way
India has long struggled with subpar crop productivity compared to its global peers. Despite more than 70 years of sustained efforts to boost agriculture yields, progress remains incremental at best. Cotton is one of India’s major crops, and has historically been an export powerhouse for us. Not only do crop yields of Indian cotton lag those in most other cotton producing nations, but a comparison of decadal growth in yields between 1962 and 2022 indicates that we are far behind. Indian cotton yields grew 2.8 times during this period, while in peers like China, Australia and Brazil this growth was between five to ten-fold (FAO STAT).
What Indian farming needs is a transformative shift in approach that moves the needle in terms of crop productivity and consequently farmer incomes. In the case of cotton farming, High Density Plantation (HDP) of cotton, an international best practice that is now gradually being introduced in India, may hold promise. High density plantations are a significant departure from the conventional wisdom of planting crops with wide spaces between them. While the conventional approach focuses on give each plant sufficient space and sunlight to grow to its full potential, and then harvesting the entire output (in this case all the mature cotton bolls); HDP aims to systematically crowd a field with a larger number of plants — going as high as 5 to 10 times the normal — and then focus on skimming off the top. So, for instance, instead of picking cotton 3–4 times over a 3 month period (till the plant is exhausted), an HDP cotton plot would focus on picking only the first flush. In the case of cotton, it promises three key advantages.
1. Higher yields. HDP works on the principle that what you lose by harvesting only the first picking, you more than make up by having more plants to harvest from. For instance, instead of harvesting 10 bolls per plant from 5,000 plants in an acre, you harvest just 4 bolls per plant, but from 25,000 plants; or just 3 bolls per plant but from 50,000 plants (figures are indicative). The net yield is at least double.
2. Opportunity for a second crop. Cotton is notoriously a long duration crop. So, in Indian conditions, it allows a farmer only one crop in a full planting season between June and March. But with HDP Cotton, the farmer who plants in late June (Kharif) can harvest by November, clear the field and take a second crop for Rabi by November/December. That helps further increase incomes.
3. Better Crop Quality. It is common knowledge that the first two pickings in cotton always deliver the best in quality (in terms of staple length, micronaire, tensile strength and other parameters typically tested). With HDP practices focusing on only the first picking, it ensures that the entire output consists of only the best cotton fiber. Meanwhile, average crop quality from traditional cotton practices typically declines due to averaging effect of mixing the superior fiber harvested in the first two pickings and the inferior ones from the later ones.
A compelling case study comes from a Farmer Producer Organization (FPO) in AP — mentored by a major corporate foundation — that piloted this concept over the last two years ; initially with 25 farmers (in 2023) and then scaled up to 500 in 2024. A sample investigation (of a dip stick sample surveyed through a combination of Crop Cutting Experiments and farmer questions ) indicated that average crop productivity was at least 40% greater in HDP farmers vis-à-vis conventional ones. And, despite factoring in the higher cultivation costs associated with HDP — stemming from higher seed rates, higher labor costs, costs of Growth regulators etc. — net incomes for HDP cotton farmers were at least 75% higher than the conventional farmers.
While the farmers in this case study were predominantly irrigated ones, and the sample was small, multiple scientific papers have attested to benefits of HDP Cotton. A 2023 paper from the Central Institute of Cotton Research (Venugopalan, M. V and Prasad,Y.G; 2023) not only advocates this practice for rainfed farmers, but also estimate HDP farmers to be getting at least a 20–30% incremental yield over the conventional farmers. The same authors also propose the possibility of even greater incomes from farmers being able to plant a second crop, as is also argued in this article.
High Density Plantations represent a paradigm shift in agriculture thinking. Furthermore, it provides farmers with a promise of significantly greater incomes from a relatively easy to follow package of practice, and one that comes without significantly adding to their investment burdens. Beyond cotton, similar success stories in Mango and Oranges suggest that this may be an approach that merits closer attention from the India’s scientific community.
Conventional approaches to productivity improvement over the past 7 decades have only shown modest results. Continuing to do more of the same is unlikely to give us any different result. What is needed is a focus on exploring transformative new approaches, and developing a set of practical and easy to follow package of practices for Indian farmers.
Views expressed in this article are purely those of the author and do not represent those of any organization that he is associated with.
