Innovation Detail

Innovation Description

Mr. Narayan Bhatt developed a dwarf and high yielding areca nut variety.
Crop: Areca nut (Areca catechu L.)
Salient features: The variety grows up to 20-25 ft and yields an average of 400-500 nuts in a bunch.
Genesis: Mr. Narayan has a large number of areca nut trees at his farm. High yielding areca trees grow up to a height of 13-16 meters. Climbing these trees is a risky job for which skilled labour is required. He faced the problem of getting good skilled labourers for the task. This made him to think of developing a dwarf arecanut variety. Several years back he bought and planted `Hirehally Dwarf' variety, which is dwarf and for which spraying and harvesting is very easy but yield is only two to three bunches and distance between internodes is one cm. He had also planted another high yielding tall variety `Mohith Nagar', in which spraying and harvesting is very difficult. He thought of crossing these two varieties to get, a dwarf and high yielding variety. He along with his son tried cross pollination and came up with dwarf areca nut variety. He started this experiment in 1997 and crossed Hirehally dwarf (male) x Mohith Nagar (female) and also Mohith Nagar (male) x Hirehally (female). The nuts obtained were planted in the next season. He got dwarf, tall and medium height plants in F2. He removed tall plants and selected dwarf and medium plants and planted further.