Thriving Fields Enhancing Soil Health and Crop Production with Less Inputs

Rising global population, shrinking arable land area pose a major challenge of feeding people. This is further marred by rapidly declining soil quality and reduced crop production. In this article, Dr Mandira Kochar and Dr Vatsala Koul share a disruptive strategy of inclusion of biological agri-inputs for enhanced crop productivity and soil enrichment in the Indian context while simultaneously reducing impacts on the environment.

Shrinking per capita arable land, surging population, and rising demands are posing a big challenge of the millennium — producing more food to feed the people while safeguarding the environment at the same time. Climate change is increasingly leading to frequent and unexpected environmental fluctuations globally. Productivity and resilience in agriculture are the topmost priorities of Government of India and it plans to focus on climate-resilient agriculture through resilient crop varieties as well as introduce farmers to natural farming. The excessive usage of chemical agri-inputs has led to degraded soil health, reduced soil fertility and deteriorated soil quality globally (1/3rd of world's soil is degraded as per FAO, 2015). This has led to declined productivity and pushed the world into food insecurity for its ever-growing population. Due to cascading issues like climate change and related environmental concerns, food supply will fall by 12 per cent over the next 25 years, triggering a 30 per cent increase in the prices of food. On one hand, healthy soil can provide balanced nutrients to plants, essential for good crop production but soils are becoming depleted in carbon content, ground water polluted with nitrates, along with increased nitrous oxide and methane emissions into the air. With the natural resource base getting depleted and degraded, major disruptions in food and its production system will, without doubt, force the agricultural system to change.

Natural Microbiomes vs Chemical Fertilizers