Agroforestry - An Alternate Land Use Option for Sustainable Dryland Agriculture

Abstract

Agroforestry, as an approach to integrated land management or alternate land use system, is widely thought to have enormous potential as a source of technological solutions to problems of rural development. Although, agroforestry is an ancient form of land use practice by many generations of rural people in many parts of the country, it is relatively a new field of organized scientific activity. Well-designed agroforestry systems can contribute to the improvement of rural welfare through a variety of direct Production roles (food, fodder, fuel, fiber and small timber etc) as well as through whole range of indirect service roles (soil and water conservation, fertility improvement, microclimate amelioration etc.). Farmers of rural areas in the country are not familiar with improved food, fodder and fuel production techniques due to various reasons. The situation, therefore, need to be tackled by producing most sustainable food-forage-fuel-finance from marginal, sub marginal and less productive and problematic sites in rural areas by development of suitable agroforestry systems like agrisilviculture, alley cropping, agrihorticulture etc. To explore the potentialities of multipurpose tree species especially nitrogen fixing tree species in different agroforestry systems, experiments at field level were initiated on red chalka soils at Student Farm, College of Agriculture, Rajendranagar, Hyderabad under dryland situation.