The Agriculture Department has set a target of distributing 32,950 tonnes of fertilisers during the Kharif season during Marketing Year 2013-14.
Against this, the storage of 5,562 tonnes of Urea, 306 tonnes of Super Phosphate, 1,133 tonnes of DAP, 195 tonnes of NPK, 940 tonnes of Potash totalling 8,136 tonnes of fertilisers had already been made in various godowns.
Deputy Director (Agriculture) Kapil Dev said in an official press release that due to lesser capacity of godowns for storage of fertilisers in the district, the
storage activity in the godowns is carried out three to four times for meeting the requirement by farmers.
In such a situation, the lifting of the fertilisers for the first time should have taken place which had happened for a far lesser tonnage, he said.
Dev said that no interest would be charged on crop loans from the farmers on advance lifting of the fertilisers till May 31, 2013 from the godowns and the counting of interest payment would take place only from June 1 this year.
The officials of Agriculture Department had appealed to the farmers to secure their requirement of fertilisers for the Kharif season so that they could be utilised during the sowing activity.This would help storage of fertilisers against the target set by the Department .
The co-operative committees which do not have storage of fertilisers as per the demands of the farmers and are unable to distribute the same can inform the status to the Deputy Director, Agriculture and Nodal Officer at Credit Co-operative Bank.
Meanwhile, the CEO of Dhamtari Zila Panchayat P S Elma has issued guidelines on preventing fire incidents during summer seasons to the farmers on their agricultural land.
He said that the farmers follow the practice of lighting up the residue on their farm lands after harvesting work which may lead to the blaze spreading to other areas.
The CEOs of Dhamtari, Nagari, Kurud and Magarload had been issued guidelines
for fire prevention on the farm lands. Elma has appealed to the farmers to exercise caution when burning the residue after harvesting to prevent any major fire incident.
He also directed suitable publicity of the guidelines in the villages for fire prevention.