Guru Angad Dev Veterinary and Animal Sciences University, Ludhiana under its ICAR sponsored Farmer FIRST Project organized a training camp on capacity building of Women Farmer Interest Group (FIG) in village Hamidi of Barnala district. It was arranged under the guidance of Dr. P.S. Brar, Director of Extension Education and Nodal officer of Farmer FIRST Project and Dr. Y.S. Jadoun, Principal Investigator (PI) of the project.
Project team members Dr. Pragya Bhadauria, Co PI, Dr. Rekha Chawla and Dr Navkiran Kaur organized the camp in which a total of 15 women beneficiary farmers participated. Dr. Pragya in her expert lecture explained to women farmers how they can initiate and strengthen entrepreneurial activities through group based approach. She stressed to take any of the livestock based enterprise such as processing of milk into value added products, silage making, backyard farming, vermicomposting, cow waste based activities etc. to begin with their group activity on mutual consensus.
Dr. Rekha Chawla in her lecture created awareness about various milk adulterants and demonstrated to detect the common adulterants such as starch, sugar in the milk sample. She emphasized on the entrepreneurial opportunities and profits that women farmers can get from making different products from the milk products at very less processing cost and higher nutritional value. Milk adulteration kits were also distributed among the women beneficiary farmers to enable them to perform the milk testing on their own.
The review of the performance of the poultry birds in the backyard units was also done by Dr. Pragya Bhadauria in the village Dhaner. Team visited the beneficiary farmer Gurmeet Singh’s farm who was rearing birds given to him under the Project. She also guided the farmer for the future entrepreneurial opportunities through marketing of the eggs and birds in an efficient way.