Dry Land Agriculture
Scenario:
Any country in the world must opt certain proportion of her cultivable area for dry land agriculture, since the available irrigation facility cannot be extended beyond static level because of its existing geographical position. The one exemption Country is Egypt, where in the land area covered under irrigation is 100 per cent.
Dry land agriculture is one, which is extreme to irrigated agriculture in terms of soil moisture availability with more than 60 per cent risk in crop production.
In India both dry land and rain fed agriculture are being practiced with 30 to 40 per cent productivity in dry land as compared to rain fed agriculture. Rain fed agri- culture is akin to irrigated agriculture in all activities except the rainfall which is the main source of moisture supply and that is available without any moisture stress to crops. Scientifically the available rainfall in a cropping season meets crop evapo transpiration fully. But in dry land, rainfall meets only 30 to 50 per cent of crops evapo transpiration.
Out of net sown area of 136.18m ha in India the dry land area amounts to 93.13 m ha (68.4%) while it is 3.1 m ha (45%) in Tamil Nadu and the percentage differs with Indian States. Though the area differs with States, dry land problems are universal.
The dry land agriculture in India supports 40 per cent of human population, 60 per cent of cattle heads for fodder and contributes 44 per cent to total food production (Kannaiyan, 2001).
Coarse cereals, pulses, oilseeds and cotton are the principal dry land crops. Irrigated crops on an average produce two tonnes of food grains per hectare, while the average productivity in dry land area is only 0.7 to 0.8 tonnes per hectare and thus indicating that the productivity from dry land agriculture is only 33 per cent of productivity from irrigated agriculture (Ramasamy and Selvaraj, 2001).
2. Issues in dry land agriculture:
Selected based on priority, certain issues related to dry land agriculture are presented here
Ø Exploitation of soil and water resources without any scientific intervention.
Ø Higher risks for natural resources, input application and crops productivity in the absence of scientific information
Ø Low per capita income
Ø Lack of institutional support to reach dry land farmers
3. SWOT Analysis:
When the tool SWOT was applied to Indian dry land agriculture, the results are as follows
3.1 Strength:
v Wider agro ecological and edaphic-climatic conditions
v Many options for technological interventions
v Larger biodiversity
v Improved transportation and communication
v Spread of NGO’s
3.2 Weakness:
ü Poverty and illiteracy
ü Higher amount of risk for input application
ü Poor participation of farmers in dry land agriculture
ü Declining natural resources
ü Irregular monsoon performance
3.3 Opportunities:
Ø Political will for food production
Ø More dry land research institutes and schemes
Ø National level dry land coordinated project
Ø Availability of GIS and RS
Ø National program on poverty alleviation
Ø State and National level plan on wasteland and water shed development
Ø Abundance availability of indigenous knowledge
3.4 Threats:
q Risk in crop production
q Lack of coordination between research, input, extension and weather forecast organizations.
q Village level political problem
q Land fragmentation- barrier to farm mechanization and technology adoption
q Rapid industrialization
4. Dry land Technology development:
Though India has developed many dry land farming practices during British period (Bombay dry land farming), with the initiation of coordinated dry land project during 1971 many more location specific technologies have been developed and tested for their sustainability. The developed technologies have been grouped and listed below
v Suitability of crops and varieties
v Delineation of efficient cropping zone
v Times of sowing with the onset of monsoon rain
v Sowing techniques
v Seed hardening
v Soil and moisture conservation
v Integrated nutrient, weed and pest management practices
v Contingency planning
Through such technologies are available, farmers seldom adopt one or two technologies. Many valid reasons may be quoted for such non-adoption and the only main reason is non-attachment of farmers to these developed technologies because of less confidence developed by the farmer and larger existing risk probability in dry land agriculture. Human touch-techonlgy training could change this situation positively.
5. Meteorological science intervention (Balasubramanian et.al., 2001):
Since dry land is a fragile eco system because of its weather oriented sensitiveness, information generated from agricultural meteorology must be blended with dry land agriculture in an optimistic way. This is an important process. Some area are short listed here under
Ø Climate characteristic of that region (Rainfall, temperature, wind, relative humidity etc)
Ø Assessing Length of Growing Period (LGP)
Ø Water balance studies to monitor surplus and deficit during cropping season
Ø Application of crop simulation model (CSM) results
Ø Providing Integrated Weather Forecast through single window (short range medium range, long range and seasonal forecast)
6. Enhancing dry land productivity :
Dry land productivity could be enhanced to three folds from present level if the activities given below have been meticulously followed.
Ø Data base development on area, crops grown, their productivity, constraints etc., at watershed level,
Ø Improving farmers participation by conducting 5 to 6 pre seasonal village level workshop,
Ø Developing seasonal plan for crop selection, technology selection, input requirement etc.,
Ø Delineation of drought prone area from drought affected areas – drought prone area must be improved only through river linking process .
Ø Computation of LGP and selecting suitable crops
Ø Providing real time, short, medium and long range forecast from single window and monitoring crop growth through remote sensing
Ø Providing crop pest and disease forewarning
Ø Empowering farmers to take farm decision based on crop simulation model results
Ø Mass introduction of farm mechanization to reduce cost of cultivation
Ø Providing marketing information
Ø Encouraging value addition to dry land produce
Ø Construction of required engineering structures like farm ponds, check dams and percolation ponds
7. Policy decision (Balasubramanian et.al., 2001)/;
For achieving any expected progress, there must be an action plan for selected policy decisions and those are listed below
a) Agro ecological zoning by employing GIS
b) Integration of weather forecast and crop simulation results
c) Taluk wise water balance and LGP studies
d) Changing farmers aptitude to dry land agriculture
e) Initiation of work on dry land crop insurance
f) Mass scale farm mechanization
g) Premium price for dry land produce
h) Encouraging human resource development in dry land agriculture
i) Availability of sufficient quantity of seed stock materials
8. Conclusion
Like Green revolution (demand driven force) for irrigated agriculture that happened during mid 60’s Government policy must made to trigger dry land development and its productivity through integration of all relevant organization in India with a mile stone activity and time frame. Watershed approach is the first step for this attempt.
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Posted On: Monday, 15 October, 2012 - 11:53