The Eight National Kitchen Garden Festival was arranged at the University of Agriculture Faisalabad with an aim to create awareness about kitchen gardening among the people.

The festival was arranged under the auspices of UAF Estate Management Department, UAF Institute of Horticulture Sciences, Park and Horticulture Authority and Agriculture Tourism Development Corporation.

Speaking as chief guest, UAF Vice Chancellor Dr Muhammad Ashraf while urging the people to promote kitchen gardening said that vegetables and fruit organically at home were free from contamination of chemicals in urea and pesticides. He said that contaminated fruit and vegetables are one cause of a variety of diseases including cancer. He said that eating home-grown vegetables and fruit protect health.

Quoiting the example of Singapore, Dr Muhammad Ashraf said they don’t have agriculture land but they were meeting their demands from cultivating in houses or roofs. He said in South Korea, they were not wasting any land from agriculture cultivation. Even one can see agriculture around the roads. He said that in China, every farmer was being provided six kanals for agriculture. He said among them, besides the other agriculture practices, he is supposed to set up two tunnels made of mud. He said that the university was also working on a low-cost mud tunnel in order to promote it among the farming community.

He lauded the government initiative of adding the kitchen gardening in Ehsaas programme. 

Principal Officer UAF Estate Management Dr Qamar Bilal said that it had become the need of the hour to promote the kitchen gardening. He added that all-out efforts were being taken to create awareness about kitchen gardening.  He said that the university has emerged as the best green campus in the country in the last six months due to proper planning.    He said that the effective measures were being taken on the part of the university in the government Clean and Green program.

Dr Shahzad Basra said that there was a dire need to change lifestyle, eat healthily and make physical activities a routine matter. He said the people in our society ignore the hazardous effect of their routine food. He said that simplicity in food makes people healthy. He said the sitting all day is causing more bad effect on health than smoking.

PHA DG Asif Ch, Agri Tourism Tariq Tanvir, Director Horticulture UAF Dr Muhammad Ayub, Dr Adnan Yousin, Dr Kahlid Shouq, Mohsin Malik and others also attended.