Influence of mounting techniques on quality of mulberry silkworm cocoons - farmer participatory research.

Farmer participatory research (FPR) is an approach, which involves encouraging farmers to engage in experiments in their own fields to learn, adopt new technologies and spread them to other farmers. Mountages play a crucial role in deciding the quality of the cocoon. Even after raising the healthy and robust silkworms, incorrect mounting method and use of improper mountages lead to inferior quality of cocoons. The present study was conducted with improved mountages and mounting techniques to enhance the quality of cocoons through farmer participatory research. While comparing the quality of cocoons produced in the three types of mounting techniques, the defective cocoon percentage is 19.17% in the plastic mountages where self mounting was adopted, 15.07% defective cocoons in the plastic mountages where worms were picked up and mounted and 7.94% defective cocoons where rotary mountages were used. Rotary mountages helps in uniform distribution of the worms to all the cells with less silk wastage as floss and slight increase in single cocoon weight. The good cocoon percentage was significantly higher (91.88%) in rotary mountages and the cocoons were uniform in shape and size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]