Most crops are sold soon after they come off the field. Rabi onion is not. It goes into a chawl and sits there while the grower waits for the price to move, and what comes out months later decides what the season was worth. Storage losses on stored onion in India are...

A chilli grower is paid on two things they cannot see while the crop is standing: colour value and pungency. The trade measures colour in ASTA units and heat in Scoville units, and both vary by variety, district and season. Teja and Guntur Sannam S4 command what they...

An importer looking at a new fertilizer supplier is not really evaluating the fertilizer. They are working out whether it can be registered, whether it clears the port, whether the documentation holds up when a sample is drawn, and whether they can move it once it...

Banana takes more potassium out of the ground than almost anything else grown in India. Not slightly more than nitrogen. Substantially more. Jalgaon runs roughly 48,000 hectares of it, mostly tissue culture Grand Naine on black soils, with yields in the 65 to 80 tonne...

Nashik accounts for the large majority of India's table grape exports, and the season is short. Shipping runs from late December into April, with the best fruit moving in February and March. What makes grape different from every other crop a distributor stocks is that...

Two national programmes have measured micronutrients in Indian soils using different methods and different sample sizes. ICAR's coordinated project analysed about 243,000 samples across 615 districts. The Soil Health Card programme analysed more than 30 million. They...