Vol. 7, Issue 2 (2019)
Conservation agriculture: Building entrepreneurship and resilient farming systems: A review
Author(s): SP Singh, RK Naresh, AS Panwar, Vivek, NC Mahajan, Sudhir Kumar, SK Tomar, Kancheti Mrunalini and KS Krishna Prasad
Abstract: “A good quality land yields good results to everyone, confers good health on the entire family, and causes growth of money, cattle and grain.†As a source of livelihood, agriculture remains the largest sector of Indian Economy. While its output share fell from 28.3% in 1993-94 to 14.4% in 2011- 12 and employment share declined from 64.8% to 48.9% over the same period. Therefore, almost half of the workforce in India still remains dependent on agriculture. Given the low share of this workforce in the GDP, on average, it earns much lower income poorer than its counterpart in industry and services. Agriculture faces many challenges, making it more and more difficult to achieve its primary objective - feeding the world – each year. By 2050 the world’s population will reach 9.8 billion, 34 percent higher than today. Annual cereal production will need to rise to about 3 billion tonnes from 2.1 billion today and annual meat production will need to rise by over 200 million tonnes to reach 470 million tonnes. Agriculture produces an average of 23.7 million tonnes of food every day. To provide for a population of 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100, food production will need to increase from the current 8.4 billion tonnes to almost 13.5 billion tonnes a year. Fifty percent of the additional food required to meet demand in 2050 will need to come from land already under cultivation. Seventy-five percent of the genetic diversity of crops has already been lost. By 2050, two out of three people on the planet will live in urban areas; a large portion of future urbanization will be caused by rural-urban migration (Buhaug and Urdal, 2013) [6]. CA addresses a wide range of agricultural production challenges that include declining soil fertility, increasing production costs; climate induced erratic rainfall patterns and increased demand for food production against severely reduced production capacities of agricultural lands. Solutions are workable options that can be tailored to raising system productivity or diversity, efficiency, resilience, value and profitability of farming, including the enabling mechanisms needed within diverse local contexts. Advances towards building entrepreneurship and resilient farming systems are the most effective and durable strategies, where all stakeholders work together to bring their ideas and support to developing and implementing site-specific solutions that allow for iterative, continuous improvement of the world's food systems and their key components. The paper offers ideas on how these problems can be addressed so as to accelerate agricultural growth in a sustainable manner.
Pages: 990-997 | 314 Views 41 Downloads
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How to cite this article:
SP Singh, RK Naresh, AS Panwar, Vivek, NC Mahajan, Sudhir Kumar, SK Tomar, Kancheti Mrunalini, KS Krishna Prasad. Conservation agriculture: Building entrepreneurship and resilient farming systems: A review. Int J Chem Stud 2019;7(2):990-997.
