Most fertilizer buying decisions in India are made on the analysis. Two products both say 13-0-45, so the cheaper one wins. The format is a separate decision, and it usually matters more to whether the season goes well. Format determines how fast the product...

A grower finds sunken black patches on the underside of the fruit, looks it up, reads that it is a calcium deficiency, and applies calcium. The next picking looks the same. That sequence repeats across Indian tomato growing every season, and the reason it fails is...

Most Indian growers test their soil. Far fewer test their irrigation water, and on a drip-irrigated farm the water matters more. Soil is tested once and changes slowly. Water passes through the root zone every day of the season, carrying whatever it holds. A borewell...

The three numbers on a fertilizer label are the percentage by weight of nitrogen, phosphorus as P2O5, and potassium as K2O. A 25 kilogram sack of 19-19-19 holds 4.75 kg of each. That much most growers know. What decides the result is not the analysis. It is whether...

A capsicum plant under a polyhouse in Pune is not the same commercial proposition as a capsicum plant in an open field forty kilometres away. It yields several times more, it runs for eight or nine months instead of three, and it is sold into a market that grades on...

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...