Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
in advance. Clay will not be available during or immediately after rainy season since
the ponds will be full, and will not dry until the next season. Failure to stock clay in
time will guarantee failure of the program, since few alternatives are available in arid
and semi-arid regions. Timely filling of polypots alone will ensure timely sowing in
nursery which is the key factor determining success or failure of nursery work.
Sowing time of each species should be considered carefully, and should be fol-
lowed strictly. Late sowing—or early or untimely sowing—will lead to faulty plants
and will therefore not provide the desired results in field.
Soilworking is time-critical in the sense that it has to be completed before arrival
of the rainy season. Otherwise soil and water conservation works will lose part of
their utility. Soilworking may be time-critical in other respects also. For example,
the hot weather is unsuitable for working in many tropical arid places, resulting
in poor productivity and quality of work. Sometimes workers will not be available
during the agricultural season, and soilworking will be impossible to execute. Often
it may be a policy within the programme to provide employment suitably spread
over the year—especially during the non-agricultural season—and this objective
will be under-served if soilworking is not executed timely. Local time constraints
such as these should be considered thoroughly while designing the time-schedule
for soilwork.
The importance of planting out the seedlings on time cannot be over-emphasised.
Each missed day is an opportunity lost, because it might rain any day, and if not
planted by then, the plants will miss the benefit of the rain, and will not be able
to make the loss good. Transportation of seedlings to the site, and preparedness
for planting—which includes readying tools, pesticide, vehicles, and well trained
workforce—are important time-critical activities.
Protection of plants from heat and frost is a time-dependent operation. For exam-
ple, if damage has been caused by frost, it will serve no purpose to do any amount of
frost proofing. Timely action to apply pesticide to contain termite damage is equally
important. Review points should be built into the working schedules to take stock of
situation at appropriate time and act accordingly.
Apart from the numerous activities having absolute time dependence, the rela-
tive timing—the time-sequencing—of activities must also be watched. For example,
however carefully the activities may have been executed in nursery, if the required
seeds are not available when all is set for sowing, it all makes for little good. Se-
quencing of seeds procurement is thus important apart from its absolute dependence
on time (i.e. the seeding season of the species).
9.1.2
Sequencing with Networking Techniques
Networking methods of sequencing the activities of a project can be gainfully ap-
plied in afforestation projects. Although exact analysis will depend upon the local
conditions, an illustrative example of a network (Fig. 9.1 ) will demonstrate how this
method can be harnessed.
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