Ecological Farming & Gardening

Agnihotra ash and its resultant atmosphere is being employed as useful in Ecological-Farming practices. Hundreds of farmers are regularly practicing Agnihotra farming methods. The fruits, vegetables and grains grown by this method are qualitatively better in texture, taste and size as compared to controlled farms where regular use of pesticides and fertilizers is done. Agnihotra atmosphere induces rapid seed germination. Agnihotra ash is an effective fertilizer and helps in releasing soluble phosphate from the soil.

PRELIMINARY STUDY

PRELIMINARY STUDIES ON THE EFFECT OF HOMA FARMING ON THE YIELD AND INCIDENCE OF LEAP SPOT, MYCOSPHAERELLA BRASSICICOLA IN CABBAGE Cv. QUESTO N.

Selvaraj, B. Ramraj, N. Seenivasan and K. Shoba
Horticulturalk Research Station, Vijayanagaram, Ooty-643001

The byproduct of Homa farming called Agnihotra ash, is obtained by burning dry cow dung, cow ghee and unbroken raw rice in an inverted copper pyramid plate at the time of sunrise and sunset with chanting specific Vedic mantras.

It was believed that adoption of homa farming in agricultural field completely sterilized the environment and cleared the field from pathogens.

Hence, an experiment was conducted to study the effect of foliar spraying of Agnihotra ash (200 gram of Agnihotra ash in 1 liter cow urine kept for three days for fermentation and dissolved in 10 liter of water) for the management of leaf spot caused by Mycosphaerella Brassicicola on Cabbage cv. Questo during the main season 2001-202 at horticultural Research Station, Ooty, Nilgiris of Tamil Nadu.

The treatments comprised of spraying of Agnihotra ash 5 times at 10 days interval, spraying mancozeb 0.2% 5 times at 10 days interval and untreated control.

The results revealed that foliar application of Agnihotra ash has increased the yield of Cabbage by 38.8% And reduced the leaf spot by 70.6% OVER untreated control.