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New Project Promotes Diverse Food Value Chains in India
May 12, 2025
In a food system, growing crops isn’t the end of the story; it’s not even the beginning. Before crops can be grown, seeds and other inputs must be purchased. After the harvest, crops may be processed or refined before moving to wholesale markets. Finally, food arrives in restaurants and grocery stores, where it’s purchased and…

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Building Climate-Resilient Agriculture with Community-Owned Solar Irrigation
The agricultural sector accounts for approximately 14% of India’s total greenhouse gas emissions, with 17.5% contributed by rice-based agricultural systems. Mitigation efforts have therefore prioritized two major themes: reducing the area under water-intensive paddy cultivation and lowering dependency on diesel or electric pumps for irrigation. Diversification of farming away from water-intensive paddy towards pulses, oilseeds,…

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Conference to Support FPOs in Latin America
April 29, 2025
The Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI) is co-organizing and cosponsoring a hemispheric conference in support of farmer producer organizations (FPOs) in Latin America. “Smallholder Producer Organizations as Business Entities in Latin America: Scope, Challenges and the Road Ahead” will be held on May 6–7 at the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) headquarters…

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In Bihar, a TCI-Supported Lab Raises Awareness of Soil Health
April 21, 2025
One of TCI’s longest-running projects, “Optimizing Soil Health” established a partnership with the Dr. Rajendra Prasad Central Agricultural University (RPCAU) in Bihar that is educating young soil scientists and undertaking critical studies of soil health and agricultural production in Bihar under the guidance of Ranjan Laik, a professor in the university’s Department of Soil Science. “We worked with…

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Testing Agrivoltaics with Farmers in Bihar
April 11, 2025
by Milorad Plavsic, Harold M. van Es
The increasing global demand for green energy and food necessitates win-win solutions that address these two priorities without undermining each other or causing negative externalities. One potential solution lies in a relatively new technology: agrivoltaics. It enables the co-location of solar panels and shade-tolerant crops, providing an environmentally sustainable source of energy while reducing competition…

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Key Takeaways from a Workshop on Climate-Resilient Agriculture in Chhattisgarh
As climate change advances, India’s rice-and-wheat-heavy agricultural sector is at risk of weakened production because of temperature changes and more frequent extreme weather events, like droughts. In an effort to make Indian agriculture more climate-resilient, the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI) and PRADAN are collaborating on a project in Chhattisgarh aimed at finding…

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Weighing the Price of Oil Palm in Nagaland
March 21, 2025
by Roderick Wijunamai
David (name changed) is one of the few Naga farmers who actually works his farm, where he grows oil palm. Most other landowners appoint “caretakers” to look over their land. David is also a part-time social worker and a grassroots politician. On a hot July afternoon, I reached David’s farm with his youngest son, just…

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Notes From a Hemispheric Workshop on ‘The Transition to a New Generation of Agrifood Systems Policies’
March 13, 2025
by Leslie Verteramo Chiu
On December 4–5, 2024, the Observatory of Public Policies for Agrifood Systems (OPSAa) held a hemispheric workshop on “The Transition to a New Generation of Agrifood Systems Policies” at the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) headquarters in Costa Rica. The objective of the workshop was to “strengthen regional cooperation to develop strategies to…

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Information Is Key to Making India Open-Defecation-Free
March 3, 2025
Solving a problem like open defecation is not as simple as installing toilets. In 2019, after decades of work, India scored a major developmental victory by providing 600 million people with access to toilets. But while the toilets were built, they are not all being used. According to a 2022 report from the WHO and…

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Matching Data with Reality
February 24, 2025
Shree Saha is passionate about data. “For me, it’s matching reality and the data that I find to be quite exhilarating,” she says. “I realize that’s the nerd in me speaking, but I really like working with data quite a bit.” It’s that passion for quantitative analysis that drives the TCI scholar’s doctoral research, which…