Role of conservation agriculture in enhancing productivity and resource use efficiency in changing scenario

Abstract

Energy crisis, special economic zones, global warming and increasing cost of agricultural inputs are the main problems that the farmers have been facing today. These problems create many other problems. Further, there has been an indiscriminate, imbalanced and excessive use of resources during the last four decades, for cultivation of crops. Consequently, the quality and quantity of our resources are adversely affected and several problems are arising in crop production, i.e. decreasing yield of crops, reducing the quality of farm produce, deficiency of plant nutrient in soil, decrease in ground water level, presence of toxic substances in soil, water, air and shortage of nutritious farm products etc. In addition to above, increasing cost of cultivation and lesser returns in agriculture is the matter of concern. Keeping in view the above problems in crop production, there is a great need of resource conservation techniques for sustainable crop production by maintaining the quality of our resources so that we can fulfill the requirement of present generation and provide better environment for future generations also. During the last one and half decade several conservation techniques like zero tillage, sowing on raising beds, crop diversification, laser levelling and SRI technique of rice growing developed. These techniques not only improve the crop production but also increase the quality of our resources. Conservation agriculture also plays an important role in reducing the cost of cultivation and conservation of natural resources, particularly soil

and water. In modern agriculture more emphasis is given on conservation tillage in which major portion of crop residues is left on soil surface. This not only improves the crop productivity but also increases the resource use efficiency. Nowadays conservation tillage is becoming popular in rice-wheat cropping system. Several researches have revealed that repeated ploughing of fields is neither profitable nor

provides additional increase in yield of crops. However, the farmer gets lesser returns while applying heavy investment on ploughing. Therefore, there is a great need to popularize these techniques among farming community so that the use of these conserved techniques lead better crop production and agriculture may become more profitable.