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19/07/24 11:44 AM IST

The green revolution in maize

In News
  • Maize production in India has more than tripled over the last two decades, making it a private sector driven green revolution success story.
  • Maize has now gone from being a feed crop to a fuel crop.
Maize production
  • Maize, unlike rice and wheat, isn’t much of a food grain. Hardly a fifth of India’s maize production is used for direct human consumption.
  • An estimated 60% goes as feed for poultry birds and livestock. Such maize is indirectly consumed as food by households – in the form of chicken, egg or milk.
  • The chicken that one eats is basically “maize with wings”.
  • A market-ready broiler bird weighing 2-2.5 kg consumes some 4 kg of feed during its rearing cycle of 40-42 days, from a 35-40 gm day-old chick. Broiler feed itself contains 55-65% maize by weight, with these at 50-60% for egg-layer feed, and 15-20% in cattle feed.
  • Maize supplies carbohydrates, the principal energy source for poultry and livestock.
  • Other feed ingredients include protein sources (soyabean meal and other oilseed cakes), mineral and vitamin supplements, and additives.
Starch and ethanol
  • Food and feed apart, 14-15% of India’s maize utilisation is for industrial purposes.
  • Maize grains have 68-72% starch, and 1-3% of other simple carbohydrates (sucrose, glucose and fructose).
  • Starch has applications in the textile, paper, pharmaceutical, food and beverage industries.
  • More recent is maize emerging as a feedstock for ethanol that is used for blending with petrol. Distilleries run on sugarcane molasses and juice/syrup during the crushing season (November-April)
  • . In the off-season (May-October), when cane isn’t available, they use grains.
  • That, until recently, was mainly surplus rice from the Food Corporation of India.
  • But with the government stopping its supplies on concerns over depleting stocks and “food security”, the focus has shifted to maize.
  •  IARI has bred India’s first “waxy” maize hybrid with high amylopectin starch content, making it better suited for ethanol production.
  • The starch in maize is a mixture of two polymers, comprising glucose molecules bonded together in a straight chain (amylose) and in branched form (amylopectin).
Features of Maize
  • Normal maize starch has 30% amylose and 70% amylopectin.
  • The starch from IARI’s waxy maize hybrid (AQWH-4) has 93.9% amylopectin.
  • Amylose starch imparts hardness in the grain, while amylopectin causes softness.
  • That, in turn, affects starch recovery and fermentation rates. Normal maize grains have 68-72% starch, but only 58-62% is recoverable.
  • The grains from the new Pusa Waxy Maize Hybrid-1, as it is proposed to be called, have 71-72% starch with 68-70% recovery.
  • Softness ensures better grinding of the grains fed into the mill for making flour.
  • Granules with higher amylopectin are also easily accessible by alpha-amylase, the enzyme that hydrolyses or breaks down the starch into smaller glucose units.
  • The glucose is, then, fermented into ethanol using yeast.
  • The IARI-developed hybrid, having an average grain yield of 7.3 tonnes per hectare and potential of 8.8 tonnes, has been identified for release under the All-India Coordinated Research Project on Maize.
Breeding strategies
  • CIMMYT has opened a maize doubled haploid (DH) facility at Kunigal in Karnataka.
  • Established in partnership with the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, it produces 100% homozygous (i.e. having two identical copies of a single gene), and genetically pure inbred lines of maize that can be used as parents for further crossing and breeding of hybrids.
  • In the conventional process, inbred lines are formed by continuous self-pollination for 6-8 generations.
  • DH technology enables production of completely uniform lines after just two cropping cycles. It speeds up inbred line development, thereby improving the efficiency of maize breeding and shortening the process.
  • Private sector-bred hybrids account for more than 80% of the 10 million hectares-plus area planted to maize in India.
  • Their higher yields, from crossing two genetically dissimilar inbred plants, are limited to the first generation. Farmers cannot harvest the same yields if they save the grains from these and reuse as seed.
  • In maize, CIMMYT is sharing its improved inbred lines with both public sector institutions and 25-odd private seed companies.
  • These include Mahyco, Shriram Bioseed, Advanta Seeds, Nuziveedu Seeds, Kaveri Seeds, Mahindra Agri Solutions, Rasi Seeds and Indo-American Hybrid Seeds.
Source- Indian Express

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