Organic Farming in Sikkim

Sikkim became India's first '100 per cent organic' state in 2016. All farming in Sikkim is carried out without the use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, providing access to safer food choices and making agriculture a more environment-friendly activity. In this article, Onam Vaid says that to make the organic plan a success, Sikkim has brought all farmers on board by assuring them that organic produce would fetch higher prices. Certified organic farming requires stringent annual inspections by qualified inspectors from accredited certification bodies.

- Onam Vaid

Ecological Security towards a Greener Future

Organic farming is an agricultural system which originated early in the 20th Century in reaction to rapidly changing farming practices. Organic farming can be defined by the use of fertilizers of organic origin such as compost manure, green manure, bone meal and the techniques such as crop rotation and companion planting. Biological pest control, mixed cropping and the fostering of insect predators are encouraged. Organic farming can be more precisely understood as "an integrated farming system that strives for sustainability, the enhancement of soil fertility and biological diversity".

The term 'eco-agriculture' was coined in 1970 by Charles Walters, founder of Acres Magazine, to describe agriculture which does not use "manmade molecules of toxic rescue chemistry", effectively another name for organic farming.

The use of organic' popularized by Howard & Rodale refers more narrowly to the use of organic matter derived from plant compost and animal manures to improve the humus content of soils, grounded in the work of early soil scientists who developed what was then called 'humus farming! Biodynamic agriculturists used the term 'organic' to indicate that a farm should be viewed as a living organism in the sense of the following quotation:

"An organic farm, properly speaking, is not one that uses certain methods and substances and avoids others; it is a farm whose structure is formed in imitation of the structure of a natural system that has the integrity, the independence and the benign dependence of an organism”. Wendell Berry, "The Gift of Good Land"