Natural Resources Management for Enhancement of Rainfed Agriculture
Contents: 1. Importance of rain feed agriculture. 2. Management of semiarid ecosystems. 3. Development of agriculture in arid ecosystem. 4. Management of high rainfall hilly areas and plains. 5. Changing paradigms in land management systems. 6. Watershed approach for better natural resource management. 7. Climate change: natural resources on global agenda. 8. Sustainable rain feed agriculture. 9. Seeds of choice for sustainable agriculture. 10. Ecological farming: a non chemical agricultural production system. 11. Drought : impact and management. 12. Future R&D needs for improving rain feed agriculture. References.
Indian agriculture is at cross roads. The Green Revolution becoming a greed resolution resulted in ecological crisis and lead to a technology fatigue. The Prime Minister called for alternatives to enhance production through smallholders and in rain feed areas.
The natural resources that support production systems are continuously degrading. This is more so in the rain feed eco-system. Unless this malady is corrected, even the improved genetic material will fail to show up its potential.
The focus has to be soil health and diminishing resources like water. Now it is widely recognized that rain feed areas are not only thirsty but hungry too. There is the need for improving the soil productivity through turnover of organics and providing deficit irrigation at physiological stages of crops become the key to improve production in rain feed areas.
Rain feed production systems are highly site specific and there can never be universal recommendations as a penances to address these systems. While efforts have to continue to evolve suitable genetic material, the first stance in enhancing the productivity is to improve soil and crop husbandry using internalized doable technologies and that too through community based systems. Such as approach results in reduced costs in production. Our country has more marginal and small farmers, mostly practicing rain feed farming.
