Farming: Back to Basics

Prasanth Bendalam*

Department of Organic Farming, Agronomy, University of Hohenheim, Germany

*Corresponding Author: Prasanth Bendalam, Department of Organic Farming, Agronomy, University of Hohenheim, Germany.

Received: April 12, 2021; Published: April 23, 2021

Citation: Prasanth Bendalam. “Farming: Back to Basics”. Acta Scientific Agriculture 5.5 (2021): 86.

  India is renowned worldwide for its prosperous agrarian economy during the pre-colonial period. The era of post-independence changed this buoyant milieu into a crisis by immoderate execution of green revolution technologies that are characterized by plethoric cost burdens and environmental degradation. Prior to the green revolution, Indian farmer’s aboriginal experience and knowledge succoured the country’s food security without much altering the environment. At the present moment, ensuring food security for the escalating populace appears to be a huge challenge with declining land area and productivity. While a core solution to these problems, alternative farming methods such as organic farming, natural farming, and biodynamic farming came into the picture.

  The meteoric increase in population and urbanization especially after the 1950s stipulated the ushering of the green revolution to yield more crops per unit land area. Despite the blessed grimier position with immense natural and environmental resources, India’s unprecedented decline in farming pursuit, unfortunately, sprinkles on account of the green revolution. Consequently inner beast of green revolution was projected by the immoderate use of agrochemicals coupled with HYV’s or GMO’s that led to stagnated crop productivity and significant soil and biodiversity erosion.

  After the 1990s fulsome ascent of external inputs in both price and use jeopardized the agricultural market system and throttled small and marginal farmers into never-ending distress. Increasing cost burdens that are occurred through purchasing of expensive external inputs combined with descent output prices impelled the capital less Indian farmers towards colossal indebtedness. As per the reports of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (2014), at least one Indian farmer is committing suicide every 30 minutes since 2002, and three-fourths of these suicides are connected to small and medium peasant families.

  As an alternative to this green revolution-induced moribund agriculture emphasis is driven towards sustainable farming systems. Initiatives such as organic farming, ZBNF and biodynamic farming etc deemed as a recuperation hope to revamp the prosperous Indian agrarian sector. Large scale practicability of these alternative farming systems to feed the teeming billions of population is yet to be answered. Returning back to this bygone cultivation methods not only safeguards the nature but also the lofty poor peasants.

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Copyright: © 2021 Prasanth Bendalam. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.