Spend a lifetime in the garden

Updated on: Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Are you a young person who has always been fascinated by flowers, fruits and honeybees? Are you a parent tired of hearing about your friends and family making their children take up engineering or medicine and instead want to send them into a field that is fresh and exciting?

Are you a hard-working middle-aged professional feeling like a candle burnt at both ends and wanting to pursue a career closer to your heart?

Welcome to horticulture — a ‘green' course that will make you spend your life happily in the shades of trees, and make money too!

The range of careers offered by horticulture is wide. Young professionals are absorbed as horticulture officers, research assistants or teachers in various government and autonomous institutions, colleges and universities. Regulatory bodies and financial institutions such as NABARD, RBI and other banks recruit both young and experienced people as field officers.

Consultancy

Consultancy is the emerging avenue for horticulturists. Consultants are people who help busy professionals raise gardens, landscape them, protect plants, and harvest fruits, flowers and foliage. They visit fields regularly and advice farmers about seed selection and treatment, identifying plant varieties, nutrition and water supply, and combating pests and diseases.

“The fastest growing market, however, is for those who specialise in ornamental plants and workplace gardens,” says Anand Reddy Pujari who runs a NABARD-supported agri-clinic in Bidar. “Corporate houses who try to express their taste through their gardens spend huge amounts on setting up and maintaining gardens. They regularly change the plants in their office windows and redesign their garden landscape. IT companies and land developers in Hyderabad employ hundreds of horticulture consultants,” he said.

Exploring options

“It is time middle-class parents look beyond medicine and engineering as career choices for their children,” said S.I. Hanumashetti, special officer of the College of Horticulture, Bidar, and an expert in plantation crops. Horticulture is among many of the lesser known professions that are as rewarding as the other popular courses, he said.

Universities and colleges

Students can enter full-time undergraduate or postgraduate or diploma programmes. They can also enrol in part-time certificate courses or short-term training programmes conducted by colleges or universities of horticulture.

As of now, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh are the only States that have a university dedicated to horticulture. Undergraduate and postgraduate courses in horticulture, however, are offered by several agriculture universities and colleges across the country.

The University of Horticulture Sciences, Bagalkot, has 10 colleges and 27 research and extension centres across the State. It offers undergraduate programmes in colleges at Arabhavi in Belgaum district, Mudigere in Chikmagalur district, Sirsi in Uttara Kannada district, Hiriyur in Chitradurga district, and in Bagalkot, Bidar, Kolar, Koppal, Mysore, and Bangalore.

Course canvas

Degree students learn a varied range of interesting subjects. They learn about fruits, flowers, bees, farm implements, soils and the climate, agribusiness, designing gardens, food processing, irrigation, diseases and pests, and nutrition. They are also trained in communicating with farmers. In postgraduation, the student can go for a specialisation in vegetable sciences, fruit sciences, post-harvest technology, floriculture and landscaping, architecture, plantation, spices, medicinal and aromatic plants, crop improvement and bio-technology, horticultural entomology or plant pathology.

The university also offers one-year postgraduate diploma courses in wine technology, precision farming and hi-tech horticulture, post-harvest processing and value addition, and production of bio-agents.

Students who have passed SSLC or PUC can enrol in other diploma courses. There are one-year certificate courses in nursery management, seed production, plant protection, post-harvest processing and value addition, and flower cultivation and arrangements. The university plans need-based ad-hoc courses for school dropouts and skill development courses for farm workers and farmers.

Course content

Students of the College of Horticulture in Bidar spend most of their time on the farm, growing fruits and walking amid flower beds. Apart from listening to lectures and experimenting in the laboratories, they work on the field to gain hands-on experience. They grow flowers in green houses, graft mangoes, take up research projects such as selecting fruit varieties that can make farms drought resistant, learn flower arrangements and prepare bouquets, prepare jams, juices, and extract scents from aromatic grasses. Students get to visit wineries, orange orchards and coffee estates. They participate in processes where wine is fermented, juice tetrapacked and coffee brewed.

“We make sure that students don't turn out to be bookworms,'' says N. Srinivas of the fruit sciences department. “Each student is assigned a plot of land in which he/she grows horticulture crops. The students face the challenges of delayed rains, insect and pest attack. They face them just as an ordinary farmer does. That hardwires whatever they learn in class.”

Course with a difference

“The most important difference between horticulture and other courses is that our students spend six months in a village among farmers. They are exposed to the hardship of the rural farmer and share the joys of life in the countryside. It is similar to the house surgeonship that medical students go through, but much more than that,” said Praveen Kumar Naikwadi of the soil sciences department.

“Most of our students don't know much about horticulture before they enter the campus. But they are pleasantly surprised at the experience they get here. For many, it is life changing,” N. Satyanarayan of the entomology department said.

Fee is not a burden

The total fee, including tuition, hostel and mess charges, is less than Rs. 10,000 per year. Students spend less than Rs. 50,000 even after completing the four-year course on an average, says Srikanth Biradar of the medicinal and aromatic plants wing who doubles as the hostel warden.

Girl power

“The share of girls in horticulture courses is growing,” says Dr. Hanumashetti. “When I went to college in the 60s, there was not a single girl among the nearly 6,000 students on the University of Agriculture Sciences campus. Now, the share of girls is 40 per cent.”

Spend a lifetime in the garden

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