Agriculture and Forestry University at Rampur, Chitwan, has established a Seed Processing Centre and Seed Testing Laboratory in Bharatpur in a bid to provide quality seeds to farmers and help them to raise farm output.

Farmers who had long been buying seeds from agents are hopeful that they will be able to gain access to better and improved seeds with the opening of the centre.

“The quality of seeds plays a vital role in increasing farm productivity, and we have high hopes that the newly established seed processing centre will increase our access to quality seeds,” said farmer Chandra Prasad Adhikari. 

The centre was established with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK government’s Department for International Development. 

It aims to produce, process and distribute quality seeds, according to Sharada Thapaliya, a dean at Agriculture and Forestry University. The centre will also provide services like drying, cleaning, purifying and packaging seeds. 

The seeds will be sold to farmers and agricultural institutions through the university. Also, farmers can ask the centre to test the quality of their seeds, Thapaliya said.

“We hope the establishment of the seed processing centre will guarantee availability of high quality seeds, as farmers here regularly complain that they can’t get good seeds,” said Kamala Neupane, information officer at the District Agricultural Development Office, Chitwan. Farming is the major occupation of many people in Bharatpur. Crops like paddy, wheat and maize are grown on 63,000 hectares of land in Chitwan, as per the statistics of the Agricultural Development Office.

Ronnie Coffman of Cornell University, which is managing the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat (DRRW) Project at the seed processing centre, said it was not possible to increase farm yields without the use of high quality seeds. 

“So the establishment of the seed processing centre will help farmers,” Coffman said. “Farmers throughout Asia have been facing problems related to low quality seeds.”

He added that one of the major objectives of the seed processing centre was to increase farmers’ access to high-yielding wheat seeds, and develop seed species that are immune to diseases and droughts.

The DRRW Project seeks to mitigate the threat of Ug99 and other stem rust races through coordinated activities that will replace susceptible wheat varieties with durably resistant varieties, created by accelerated multilateral plant breeding and delivered through optimised developing country seed sectors, according to Cornell University.