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Seeking sustainable pathways for fostering agricultural transformation in peninsular India

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Relation http://oar.icrisat.org/11818/
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abed7b
doi:10.1088/1748-9326/abed7b
 
Title Seeking sustainable pathways for fostering agricultural transformation in peninsular India
 
Creator Anantha, K H
Garg, K K
Petrie, C A
Dixit, S
 
Subject Sustainable Agriculture
South Asia
Land Degradation
Water Resources
 
Description Sizable populations in developing countries in Asia and Africa live in dryland ecosystems, and
agriculture in these areas faces major challenges including water scarcity, land degradation, poor
infrastructure and insufficient access to markets. Natural resource management (NRM)
interventions offer an important path to sustainable agricultural practices through increasing
resource use efficiency, but true efficacy will only be achievable if these initiatives can be scaled up.
This paper explores the impact of farm-scale NRM interventions undertaken in the state of
Karnataka, India, between 2005 and 2020. NRM technologies such as soil health management,
resource use efficiency and improved crop cultivars were demonstrated in more than 50 000
farmers’ fields. Participatory demonstrations and capacity building initiatives were effectively used
to co-create innovations for rapid and wide dissemination, and NRM practices involving the
soil-nutrient-crop-water continuum were the subject of large-scale demonstrations. The
demonstration fields were divided into treated and control fields, and efforts were made to measure
cost of cultivation, irrigation application and crop yield. The soil health management interventions
helped to enhance crop yield by 10%–60% over the control plots. Technologies specific to resource
conservation have helped to conserve soil moisture, reduce irrigation requirement by 50–300 mm
and reduce the cost of cultivation by US$ 150 ha−1. Improved cereal, pulse and oil seed cultivars
increased crop yield minimum by 15%. Although these results have a large variability, they
consistently showed the effectiveness of integrating NRM practices with crop demonstrations.
These results are ideal for sensitizing stakeholders and policymakers to the benefits of adopting
science-based approaches to NRM interventions in order to bridge yield gaps and address land
degradation, food insecurity and poverty in dryland regions in South Asia and globally.
 
Publisher IOP Publishing
 
Date 2021-03
 
Type Article
PeerReviewed
 
Format application/pdf
 
Language en
 
Identifier http://oar.icrisat.org/11818/1/pdf.pdf
Anantha, K H and Garg, K K and Petrie, C A and Dixit, S (2021) Seeking sustainable pathways for fostering agricultural transformation in peninsular India. Environmental Research Letters (TSI), 16 (4). pp. 1-13. ISSN 1748-9326