Hyderabad: The Rs 500-crore Vibha Seeds Group ( Parchuri Vidyasagar Chairman and Managing director) has invested Rs 200 crore to set up a multi-crop seed processing facility at Janampet in Mahboobnagar district of Andhra Pradesh. The state-of-the-art centre, built on about 106 acres, is one of the biggest of its kind in the world. The company is engaged in private crop genetics and plant breeding researches. It undertakes crop improvement research programmes and reaches out to more than 20 million farmers across 19 states.
According to Vidyasagar Parchuri, CMD, Axis Bank and L&T are providing 80% of the funding as debts and the rest is from internal accruals. He said that plant has the capacity to process 1,200 mt of field and vegetable crops per day. It is claimed to be the world’s largest plant that includes an industrial scale biotech laboratory, a corn-cob drying facility, a cotton processing plant, warehouse packaging and cold storage facilities. The facility can roll out 100 trucks of processed seeds of over 190 products in 12 field crops and 18 vegetable crops, per day, he added.
Incidentally, the company is integrating biotechnology and genetic engineering with conventional breeding methods. Its gene bank includes 60,000 germ plasms of all its seed crops. The company has research farms on 800 acres, 15 R&D centres and 34 multi-location testing centres across the country. With cotton as its focus, the company has become the fourth largest cotton player, and doubling its sales this year from 25 lakh packets. It has over 11 Bollgard and 14 Bollgard II cotton hybrids for all the three cotton growing zones.
It is in collaboration with International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Asian Vegetable Research and Development Centre, Centro International de Mejoramiento de Maizy Trigo, International Rice Research Institute and Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics.
According to Vidyasagar Parchuri, CMD, Axis Bank and L&T are providing 80% of the funding as debts and the rest is from internal accruals. He said that plant has the capacity to process 1,200 mt of field and vegetable crops per day. It is claimed to be the world’s largest plant that includes an industrial scale biotech laboratory, a corn-cob drying facility, a cotton processing plant, warehouse packaging and cold storage facilities. The facility can roll out 100 trucks of processed seeds of over 190 products in 12 field crops and 18 vegetable crops, per day, he added.
Incidentally, the company is integrating biotechnology and genetic engineering with conventional breeding methods. Its gene bank includes 60,000 germ plasms of all its seed crops. The company has research farms on 800 acres, 15 R&D centres and 34 multi-location testing centres across the country. With cotton as its focus, the company has become the fourth largest cotton player, and doubling its sales this year from 25 lakh packets. It has over 11 Bollgard and 14 Bollgard II cotton hybrids for all the three cotton growing zones.
It is in collaboration with International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Asian Vegetable Research and Development Centre, Centro International de Mejoramiento de Maizy Trigo, International Rice Research Institute and Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics.
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