Crop Productivity

A roundtable discussion was held on upscaling strategy and global experience sharing on 3^rd March 2011 at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi in order to gain more insights and improve understanding on the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). The issues of sustainable food security assume national importance, as the country is debating on the crucial National Food Security Bill. Breaking yield barrier, accelerating growth of production and ensuring sustainability are the critical policy concerns in Indian agriculture.

The roundtable discussion underlined the need to harness the opportunities offered by the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) and its extensions to crop production in many areas. This may help in substantially reducing the need for embedded subsidies in every grain of rice while achieving increases in yield by 15 per cent to 40 per cent or more over present conventional methods. In India about 1.7 million farmers are estimated to have adopted the technique on more than 7.5 lakh hectares across 160 districts, without any major project funding so far. Tamil Nadu and Tripura are the leading states for adoption of SRI, but many others are following suit.

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The following article is based on a field experiment in International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), where low cost farming systems that involve use of biological inputs obtained from the field is compared with conventional farming.

The researchers here discuss the experiences gained from this experiment and those gathered from organic farmers. Further, the authors offer suggestions for future demonstration and verification experiments, to study the virtues of organic  farming.Read More

This paper, part of a larger book 'Biological approaches to sustainable soil systems', reports the results of a field experiment, conducted in Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh, where the yields of crops grown by low-cost inputs including plant biomass are compared with chemical fertiliser-induced production.

The study was conducted over 1999-2004, and the findings conclude that the yields of low intensive biological farming are as good, if not better than chemical fertiliser intensive farming.Read More

This paper discusses the need to shift from chemical intensive agriculture to organic farming. The authors in their vision for a chemical-free agriculture also stress that organic agriculture is a way to achieve food security.Read More

The authors begin with the current crisis in Indian agriculture. Stating that though the Green Revolution made India self-sufficient in food production in the shortest time it also resulted in a host of problems. The indiscriminate use of fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides has created problems of decline in the soil fertility, pollution of water resources, and chemical contamination of food grains, amongst the many similar issues now linked to the Green Revolution.