Meerut: Six years after Meerut-based Central Institute of Research on Cattle (CIRC) lost huge land banks in 30 military farms across the country, thus derailing the ambitious programme aimed at revolutionising the milk sector, the institute will now get a 150-acre landbank in Babugarh (in Hapur) cantonment to salvage its ambitious Frieswal project. It took over three decades to develop it for around Rs 800 crore.
The project aimed at the introduction of high-yield crossbred species of two cows, Holstein (Dutch) and Sahiwal (Indian) in the country.
It suffered a setback in 2017 after the Defence cabinet committee decided to close 30 military farms owing to “high maintenance cost”.
It was on these farms that CIRC kept 25,000 crossbred cattle, including 15,000 bulls and calves.
“Another positive development is that recently, the Breed Registration Committee held a meeting at the office of our parent body, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and soon Frieswal will be declared a ‘breed’. This will help us to scale up the breeding at the farmer level with the help of the semen station where we’ve kept 23 lakh doses of high-quality bull semen. After bio security upgradation they’ll be ready for the market,” Mohanty further said.
Notably, a massive cross-breeding programme was initiated at Meerut in 1987 as a result of an agreement between the defence ministry and ICAR. The project was named ‘Frieswal’.
According to the agreement, the land was to be provided by the defence ministry in the form of existing military farms while technical expertise was provided by ICAR through CIRC.
After extensive research for decades and an expenditure of close to Rs 800 crore, Frieswal crossbreed was developed that had 62.5% genetic strains of Holstein species and 37.5% of Sahiwal.
