Aquaculture is an important agriculture sector in Dhanusha district with the involvement of large number of farming community. An interview-based questionnaire survey of 45 randomly selected fish farmers and 13 fish traders in fish block area of Dhanusha district, Nepal was carried out to appraise current situation of Production and marketing system of fish farming during the period of February to April, 2020. Majority of the farmers (86.76%) had done fish farming as main occupation and was found to be profitable with the average productivity of 5.53 Mt/ha/year and B/C ratio of 1.37. Most of the farmers were practicing carp polyculture however, monoculture and integrated fish farming was also found to be done by few respondents. Fish produced were sold in local market, adjacent districts and also to distant markets. The findings showed that traders were involved in marketing system of fish of which 59.65% of the total was sold to the wholesalers, 30.49% to the retailers and 9.87% was sold directly to the consumers. Commonly used means of transportation were bicycle, motorbike and pickup vans. The study also revealed that farmers were facing several problems like lack of technical knowhow, untimely availability of feed and other inputs, disease and water quality problem, lack of well managed commodity market, poor storage facilities etc. which needs to be addressed to enhance the fish production and marketing efficiency in the study area.

A study was carried out in Dailekh, Nepal with an objective to assess the mandarin orchard management practices and their level of adoption by mandarin growers of Dullu municipality. All together 60 respondents were selected for the household survey in major citrus-producing wards of Dullu by following the simple random sampling technique. Primary data were collected by administering the pretested questionnaire and; descriptive and inferential statistics were computed using Ms-Excel and SPSS. The result showed that the majority of the respondents were from Brahmin ethnicity (43.3%), middle-age group i.e. 35-49 years (53.3%), and male (70.0%). Furthermore, most of them belonged to medium size family of 5-8 members (60.0%) and were earning most of their income through agriculture (80.0%). The result of the study revealed the variation in the scale of adoption of different management practices. Most of the households had adopted pruning and applied farmyard manure (FYM) while the least of them had adopted mulching and applied chemical fertilizer. Chi-square test revealed that the factors such as age (p=0.042), education level (p=0.007), family size (p=0.029), and training exposure (p=0.001) were significantly associated with the level of adoption of these practices. Incidence of insect-pests and diseases (I=0.88), frequent occurrence of climatic hazards such as hailstorms (I=0.71), and limited irrigation facility (I=0.70) were the major problems of mandarin growing households. It is recommended that improving access to irrigation facilities, use of certified planting material, mulching application and use of appropriate dose of manure and fertilizer must be prioritized in the study area.

Along with the population, organic waste has been rising significantly in recent years. The resulting uncontrollable waste loads and conventional methods of waste treatment have begun to cause chaos at the landfill sites. This study evaluates the performance of an anaerobic digestion process using batch reactors for the treatment of landfill leachate collected from the Sisdole landfill site in Nuwakot, Nepal. A lab-scale anaerobic batch reactor was set up in Kathmandu University, Nepal. Using an anaerobic digestion process, COD values of the leachate decreased from 2230 mg/l to 1125 mg/l (removal efficiency of ~50%), whereas total solids concentration decreased from 1925 to 925 mg/L under a retention time of 10 days. In addition, Monod’s model was established to design an Anaerobic Sequential Batch Reactor to achieve better performance, resulting in 85% removal efficiency for the leachate treatment. Overall, this study analyzed the anaerobic digestion process on the landfill leachate of Sisdole, and modeled the process to identify the conditions required for increasing the efficiency of treatment of Sisdole landfill leachate.

A survey entitled “Assessment of effectiveness of Shallow tubewell irrigation in Dhanusha district” was carried to seek the status of Shallow tubewell irrigation and its effectiveness in agriculture. A total of 30 respondents were selected on the basis of simple random sampling method who uses shallow tubewell for irrigation. Major occupation of 77% of population of survey area was agriculture and about 73% of households were doing rainfed agriculture before installation of shallow tubewell. A total of 201.23 bigha of land was irrigated and 250 families were benefited from shallow tubewell irrigation. The area under cultivation and production of crops was also found to be increased after installation of shallow tubewell. The average annual production of cereals and vegetables after use of shallow tubewell was 6.01 ton and 1.08 ton respectively. The monoculture system of cropping was changed to multiple cropping system after installing shallow tubewell. Farmers now cultivated 1-5 types of crops before which 1-2 types before shallow tubewell irrigation. Rice, wheat and vegetables were cultivated in 1258 katha, 582 katha and 32 katha of land respectively before installing shallow tubewell but after installation cultivated in 1330 katha, 697 katha and 232 katha of land respectively. Similarly, productivity of rice. increased from 95.96 to 142.08 ton, wheat from 29.98 to 46.67 ton and vegetables from 7.52 to 27.9 ton after use of shallow tubewell irrigation. Poor supply of electricity was the major problem with the index value of 0.89 followed by canal problems.

The significantly highest plant height (198.06 cm) was measured for treatment 120 kg N/ha and the lowest plant height (162.6 cm) was measured for treatment 0 kg N/ha at 95 days after sowing. Likewise, significantly shortest period to tasseling (74.3 days) and silking (78.0 days) under the application of 120 kg N/ha but at par with treatment 90 kg N/ha (75.1 days) and (78.7days) respectively and longest period to tasseling (79.7 days) and silking (85.4 days) under the application of 0kg N/ha but at par with treatment 30 kg N/ha (78.7) and (84.6 days) respectively was obtained. Similarly, the highest grain yield (3.7 t/ha) was obtained for treatment 120 kg N /ha which was significantly higher than all other treatments but at par with treatment 90 kg N/ha (3.5 t/ha) and the lowest grain yield (1.5 t/ha) was obtained for treatment 0 kg N/ha which was significantly lower than all other treatments but at par with treatment 30 kg N/ha (1.8t/ha). Overall study shows that almost all parameters of spring maize increase significantly with the increasing dose of nitrogen up to 90kg/ha. But no significant difference was observed on yield and yield attributes while increasing the nitrogen dose from 90 to 120 kg/ha. Thus, for the optimum and sustainable production of spring maize, 90 kg N/ha can be used as a recommended dose in Madichaur, Rolpa.