Plants are subjected to a wide range of environmental stresses which reduces and limits the productivity of agricultural crops. Two types of environmental stresses are encountered to plants which can be categorized as (1) Abiotic stress and (2) Biotic stress. The abiotic stress causes the loss of major crop plants worldwide and includes radiation, salinity, floods, drought, extremes in temperature, heavy metals, etc. On the other hand, attacks by various pathogens such as fungi, bacteria, oomycetes, nematodes and herbivores are included in biotic stresses. As plants are sessile in nature, they have no choice to escape from these environmental cues. Plants have developed various mechanisms in order to overcome these threats of biotic and abiotic stresses. They sense the external stress environment, get stimulated and then generate appropriate cellular responses. They do this by stimuli received from the sensors located on the cell surface or cytoplasm and transferred to the transcriptional machinery situated in the nucleus, with the help of various signal transduction pathways. This leads to differential transcriptional changes making the plant tolerant against the stress. The signaling pathways act as a connecting link and play an important role between sensing the stress environment and generating an appropriate biochemical and physiological response.
Innovative techniques and technologies are being developed at different research stations for the enhancement of apple production. But due to poor extension contact with credible agencies, the same technology has not been fully utilised by the growers at their farms. The study was conducted in three districts of Kashmir division selected purposively with multistage sampling; having maximum area under apple cultivation. The study used focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and a household survey. The majority of the apple growers from district Shopian (55.44%) and district Baramulla (48.67%) were having medium level of extension contact with different extension agencies in contrast to district Budgam, where majority of the apple growers were having low level of extension contact. However, majority of the apple growers from district Shopian (61.39%) contacted private agencies for consultation, while high level of contact (48.81% of apple growers) with private agencies was found among the apple growers of district Budgam.
The study was conducted in horticulture zone Tangmarg of district Baramulla of Jammu and Kashmir. Horticulture Zone Tangmarg comprises of 65 villages out of which 35 villages were under cherry cultivation, from 35 villages 06 villages were selected purposively on the basis of maximum area under cherry cultivation. From the selected 06 villages 120 cherry growers were selected through proportionate allocation method. It has been observed that the skills of cherry growers regarding expert guidance planning, layout planning, soil testing pest and disease management, nutritional management training and pruning etc. were low and as such majority (46.67%) of the cherry growers have high training needs. Integrated disease management receiving highest score was the most prioritized thematic area for training need followed by Soil testing, training and pruning techniques, integrated pest management etc. The training need for marketing technique, processing and value addition packing and grading was given lowest priority by the cherry growers. It was concluded that need based cost effective training programmes and strategies need to be tailored, so that human resource be put to effective use for achieving sustainable cherry production.
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