Name : Shri Jitendra Malik
District & State : Panipat, Haryana
Category : Agricultural (General)
Award : National
Award Function : 8th National Grassroots Innovation Awards
Award Year : 2015
Price : Rs.2,88,000 (ex-factory India price + packaging). The price does not include transportation costs, taxes, etc.
Delivery Period : One Month
Innovator Profile
Innovation Description
Technical Specification
Salient Features
Scout: Direct
Jeetender Mallik (37) is a young farmer who has developed a compost making machine for mushroom cultivation to address labour shortage issues. This machine can properly turn and mix the compost, remove lumps and add moisture to it as well as a result good quality compost can be prepared in lesser time.
Background
The village Seenkh, where Jeetender lives, is the border village between Panipat and Jind districts and is predominantly agriculture based. Most of the people grow wheat, paddy, maize and sugarcane. Theirs is the only family undertaking mushroom cultivation in the entire village and nearby areas. Jeetender has studied upto class 10th and has been engaged in agriculture ever since. He lives in a joint family with his parents and three brothers and their family. He is married and has a daughter and a son. In his free time, Jeetender likes to play volleyball.
He played basketball as a school student and won a few awards as well. As a child he was not much into studies but sports. His mother recalls that he used to break the toys given to him by her to see what was inside and how it worked. His parents wanted him to study like his brothers but he was totally disinterested. He started experimenting with machines when he became a full time mushroom cultivator and felt the need of making machines for his work. Apart from the mushroom compost making machine, he has also made a sieve for casing soil for mushroom cultivation and a manual drill to make holes for putting bamboos for erecting bamboo shades.
Genesis
Jeetender started mushroom cultivation in 1996 after a visit to his maternal uncle in Himachal Pradesh where he saw mushroom being cultivated. He learnt the cultivation techniques there and came back and started his work at his paternal farm. Low cost mushroom production technology involves the use of thatched houses erected on bamboo sticks drilled in the ground by making holes. The mushroom shed of 100 q compost capacity is erected by making 80 holes, which requires two man days. The quality of holes made by the labour remains uneven and stability of thatched house is comparatively less. In 2002, a bed of mushroom did not give good results as the bamboo stilts were not properly placed. This led Jeetender to develop a mobile electric motor operated hole digger, which has productivity equivalent to eight man hours and yields holes of even depth and diameter. This imparts greater stability to the thatched house which makes it possible to increase the spacing between two adjacent holes which further reduces the cost involved in the construction of a thatched mushroom shed. Later, in 2006, he also developed a simple machine for turning dry compost on the ground.
In 2008, while the compost for mushroom farming had been collected, labour shortage threatened to spoil it as it could not be processed. Jeetender realized that the compost should be mixed in time before it gets spoiled. Borrowing money from his brother, after some hits and trails he could develop a machine in a couple of weeks’ time.
http://nif.org.in/innovation/compost-maker-for-mushroom-cultivation/780