Year: 2016 | Month: December | Volume 3 | Issue 2
Agricultural Sustainability and Organic Farming
Ranjan Kumar Biswas
DOI:10.5958/2454-9541.2016.00015.3
Abstract:
In the 20th century, great increases in productivity of Indian agriculture has encouraged higher and higher use of heavy farm equipment, fossil fuel, intensive tillage, high-yielding crop varieties, irrigation, extraneous inputs, and capital. In the process we incurred a great loss in the eco-system by indiscriminate use of fertilizers and other chemicals. Now, what we need is to save our natural resources – water, biodiversity and land. It may not be wondering if we assume that organic farming system may generate such situation to address both the challenges mentioned above. The present paper devoted an exploring effort to find out what performance is brought about by organic farming to address the problem of sustainability of crop productivity of different vegetable crops grown in West Bengal across the seasons. The sustainability measures viz. Sustainable Yield and Sustainable Value Indices (SYI and SVI) have been used for the purpose. The results showed that despite lower production in organic farms than inorganic farms, the sustainability of productivity occurred in organic farms were satisfactory. On the other hand, net return (value of products) from organic farms exhibited moderate sustainability. This was due to unorganized market for price premium of organic productions. Another reason of unattractive receipt from organic farms was higher cost of organic nutrients. The analysis concluded that availability of market and price premium with easy accessibility in sufficient quantity of organic manure may influence more sustainability in receipts towards vegetables cultivation in organic farms.
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