|
|
|
Overview |
Crop Production |
Crop Pattern |
Crop Yield |
Irrigation |
Soil Management | Precision Farming |
Relevant Products |
Relevant Links
A GIS and Remote Sensing based approach to develop cold storage infrastructure for horticultural crops: A case study for potato crop in Bardhaman district, West Bengal
S. S. Ray, S. Dutta, N. Kundu and S. Panigrahy
Agro-Ecology and Management Division, ARG, Space Applications Centre (ISRO)
Ahmedabad - 380 053
1IWM&ED, Calcutta, West Bengal
shibendu_ray@hotmail.com
Horticultural crops cover a large number of
fruits, vegetables, flowers which are highly perishable in nature. Post harvest
losses estimated to be in the range of 20-40 per cent. Hence, emphasis is given
to develop post harvest infra-structure like cold storage, food processing,
packaging, market outlets etc. during the current plan period . Most of the cold
storages are concentrated in and around the consuming markets. Thus, very little
facility exists to cater to the marginal farmer’s requirement during the
harvesting season. Potato is one of the most important vegetable crop. Though 90
per cent cold storage facilities of the country is for potato crop and located
in the potato growing regions, still it falls far below the requirement. The
National Co-operative Development Corporation is trying to promote the setting
up of such storage facility in the co-operative sector.. Thus, a scientific
approach to evolve a methodology to locate sites for cold stores which would be
optimally utilised by the growers is required. A pilot study was taken up to
analyse the demand and supply situation and evolve an optimum plan to locate
cold stores using satellite remote sensing (RS) data and Geographic Information
System (GIS). The study was done for potato crop in Bardhman district of West
Bengal, a leading potato growing area.
Materials and Methods
Study Area
Bardhaman district is one of the
major potato growing districts of West Bengal. The study was conducted for three
police stations of Bardhaman district, namely, Jamalpur, Kalna and Memari which
account for 82.9 and 83.3 per cents of potato area and production of the
district respectively. There are 35 potato cold storages in the study area.
Data used
Satellite based RS data of IRS 1C WiFS (188 m resolution) was used for potato crop map generation. For getting the road network and settlement location high resolution RS data of IRS 1C LISS -III (23 m resolution) and Survey of India toposheets were used. The information about the cold storage locations, cold storage statistics (capacity, ownership, area of jurisdiction ) and potato crop statistics were collected from Department of Agricultural Marketing, West Bengal.
Crop Map Generation
The RS data was
georeferenced and the boundary mask of Bardhaman district was overlaid. The
extracted data was classified using a Maximum Likelihood classifier. Field
information collected synchronous to the satellite pass was use for the
supervised classification.
GIS Analysis
Spatial database was made for
all the spatial data, like, road network, settlement locations, cold storage
locations using Arc/Info GIS software. The database of the statistics of the
cold storages was also linked to the spatial data. The raster image of the crop
map, generated from satellite data, was converted to points coverage. Two steps
of analysis was used for locating optimum cold storage sites. Those are
buffering analysis and location-allocation analysis. In buffering analysis
buffers were created around villages and already existing cold storage
locations. The buffer sizes for the cold storages varied as per the capacity of
the storage. Village buffer sizes were also dependent upon the village sizes. A
large number (96) of probable cold storage sites were marked using the following
criteria :
- the cold storage should be near a major
road,
- it should be within the buffer of a
settlement,
- it should not be within the buffer of the
already existing cold storages.
Using the already existing cold-storages and
the new probable sites location-allocation analysis was carried out to a) locate
the required number of optimum new sites and b) allocate crop points to cold
storage.
|
|
|