A seminar on agroinnovations «Possibilities of using spatial technologies in agriculture» was held in the conference hall of the Technology Centre of the Academy of Sciences of Turkmenistan, which brought together the scientific community of the capital and university teachers.
The meeting of scientists was intended to outline priority directions for the development of agricultural science in support of state policy on food security while preserving the gene pool of agrobiodiversity - the wealth of the country, collegial familiarization with the results of research carried out by the Academy of Sciences and departmental scientific institutes in the field of agricultural production and processing sector, selection and seed production, promotion of energy efficiency and rational use of water and land resources, protection of farmland fertility, activation of mutually beneficial scientific and practical projects and proposals of the Centre for the agricultural worker, thanks to which Turkmenistan is turning into a land of abundance and blooming gardens.
An exchange of views took place, leading researchers and graduate students of the Centre shared their achievements, plans, and progress of current work. They talked about new vectors of scientific activity in cooperation with research institutes of Russia and the Republic of Belarus in the field of biotechnology, planned research in the field of nanotechnology together with Chinese and Turkish colleagues. Among the speakers was a researcher at the Biodiversity Laboratory of the National Institute of Deserts, Flora and Fauna of the Ministry of Environmental Protection of Turkmenistan, Candidate of Biological Sciences Olga Arzyamova, who spoke about biotechnology in cotton growing, in particular, about the possibility of growing cotton seeds in a sterile environment in a test tube using the «in» method. vitro. As the speaker noted, the goal of the experiment was to obtain a pure crop in order to, using molecular biology and genetic engineering, in the future create lines of cotton with specified characteristics - high fiber quality, yield, resistance to diseases and pests, salt tolerance.
Agriculture is closely connected with the land, which involves studying the condition of soils and maintaining the yield of land. Nikolai Nikolaev, a researcher at the laboratory of GIS technologies, in his presentation reported on the Centre’s project to study the level of land fertility based on soil cartograms compiled on the basis of geographic information systems, that is, GIS technologies. The development was used when fulfilling an order for one of the Research Institutes located in Anev (as you know, the head of state recently established three research institutes - agriculture, cotton growing and grain growing). Here, field research was carried out, laboratory study of the samples taken, then, through spatial analysis and interpolation, the content of nutrients in the soil - nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, humus, as well as the acidity and degree of salinity of the arable layer was revealed. In the future, it is planned to develop a partnership in this direction with the private sector of agricultural production.
The younger generation was represented by graduate students of the Technology Centre - Hekim Bekmyradov and Shohrat Atamanov. The first introduced the audience to techniques for monitoring saline soils using remote sensing, and the second spoke about studying changes in agricultural land using satellite data. An interesting development, which is now being tested in the field, was presented by a teacher from the Department of Ecology, Faculty of Geography, TSU named after Magtymguly Serdar Hudaynazarov. It was an automatic water pump that operates without electricity or fuel, lifting and supplying water to the field using a vacuum method, using a small solar panel.
