Irrigation

This paper by Himanshu Thakkar published in the journal Development looks at the daunting challenges that future water demand places on India a

Introduction

This pan-Indian outreach effort involved dialogues with tens of thousands of citizens, demanding that the nation should devote urgent attention to the continuing agricultural crisis and allocate highest priority to the agriculture sector, ending decades of neglect.

 A large number of farmers and well operators were interviewed in the process. Data was also collected from the power utility that supplies power to this region. Along with this the climatic peculiarities of the region, farmers and well users perceptions on ground water management and use were also collected.

This approach is based on the integration of readily available remote sensing, national crop productivity and land use statistics and weather data.

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.

Further, the authors offer suggestions for future demonstration and verification experiments, to study the virtues of organic  farming.

Two of the four systems are low-cost farming methods which are based on traditional and scientific knowledge on using crop residues, farm-waste, compost, Gliricidia lopping, bacterial inoculants, and herbal extracts as nutrients to nourish the soil, and as biopesticides to manage pests.

The third system is conventional agriculture which is the "control" and receives chemical input as suggested by research institutions depending on crop type. The fourth is a combination of the  first three.