Day 43 – Q 3.Why is drylands farming significant for Indian farmers? Enumerate various ways to make drylands farming more productive and profitable.
3. Why is drylands farming significant for Indian farmers? Enumerate various ways to make drylands farming more productive and profitable.
फसल के बाद की प्रौद्योगिकियां क्या हैं? भारतीय किसानों के लिए उनके महत्व की जांच करें।
Synopsis:
Dry farming or Dry Land Farming refers to an improved system of cultivation whereby maximum amount of water is conserved by soil and water management. It involves efficient system of soil and crop management in the regions of low land and uneven distributed rainfall.
Characteristics of the dry land farming:
- Uncertain, ill-.distributed and limited annual rainfall;
- Occurrence of extensive climatic hazards like drought, flood etc;
- Undulating soil surface;
- Occurrence of extensive and large holdings;
- Practice of extensive agriculture i.e. prevalence of mono cropping etc;
- Relatively large size of fields;
- Similarity in types of crops raised by almost all the farmers of a particular region;
- Very low crop yield;
Significance of dry land farming in India:
In India, the importance of dry-land farming is increasing year by year. With continuous growth in the size of population in India, the gap between the requirements and the supply of agricultural output is increasing gradually leading to a crisis in respect of both food and non-food crops.
Considering the present rate of development of irrigation facilities and also water potentiality of the country, it is estimated that at any point of time 50% of cropped area in India will remain under Rain fed farming system. Such vast areas as of now consume hardly 25% of total fertilizer consumption of the country. Due to poor level of management, crop productivity is also very low resulting in socio economic backwardness of the people.
Major dry farming crops are millets such as jowar, bajra, ragi; oilseeds like mustard, rapeseed and pulse crops like pigeon pea, gram and lentils. Almost 80 percent of maize,90 percent of Bajra, approximately 95 percent of pulses and 75 percent of oilseeds are obtained from dryland agriculture.
Measures need to be taken to make dry land farming more productive and profitable:
Our country has fertile cultivable land and receives the highest amount of rainfall per unit area basis, anywhere in the world. However, there are some measures need to be taken to make dry farming more productive and profitable like:
- Need to grow those crops which are drought tolerant.
- India’s protein security is mostly laid in the dry land farming, so need to adapt technologies from the countries like Israel which has a significant experience and expertise in the dry land farming.
- Control of weed of various types is also significant.
- As our country’s 75 % area is semi-arid so the need for these two can be overemphasized, they help by By imparting knowledge regarding available resources and there use. Most importantly they promote local led development i.e. demand driven.
Success stories such as of-
- Ralegaon siddhi ,
- Hivere bajar in Maharashtra and
- Sukhomajari in Haryana is e.g. of success of dry land.
Government initiatives to help the dry land farming to make it more profitable and productive:
- The National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA), which is one of the eight missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) seeks to address issues associated with climate change.
- Sub-Mission on Agroforestry under the framework of National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA) has been launched during 2016-17 for a period of 4 years (2016-17 to 2019-20).
- National Agroforestry Policy, 2014 has been formulated with the objective to bring coordination, convergence and synergy between various elements of agroforestry scattered in various existing Missions, programmes and schemes of the Government.
- The Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY) was launched on 1st July, 2015 with the motto of ‘Har Khet Ko Paani’ for providing end-to end solutions in irrigation supply chain, viz. water sources, distribution network and farm level applications.
- Agriculture Contingency Plan: CRIDA, ICAR has prepared district level Agriculture Contingency Plans in collaboration with state agricultural universities using a standard template to tackle aberrant monsoon situations leading to drought and floods, extreme events adversely affecting crops, livestock and fisheries.y
- Even GOI has declared 2018 as year of millets and also proposed to declare 2019 as year of millets in FAO.
Best Answer: December
