In 1999, Aspen and David Edge bought Semilla Besada, a 12 hectare farm in southern Spain, with the intention of re-establishing its family farming tradition. They faced various challenges: the dryland environment, lack of markets and little social support.
Lakshman Oraon and his wife Sarla are no ordinary farmers. On less than an acre of land, they grow paddy, tomatoes, potatoes and onions. Their crop of paddy has just been harvested and you can see the dry remnants sticking out of the soil. But they are getting ready for a second major crop. It could be wheat with mustard and pulses in the margins.
Small land holders can be self sustainable. This was proved by Shri. Santu, a small farmer in Gorakhpur, who started making a decent living from farming by increasing the diversity on the farms and integrating one into another.
The horticulture sector encompasses a wide range of crops, e.g., fruit crops, vegetable crops, potato and tuber crops, ornamental crops, medicinal and aromatic crops, spices and plantation crops. India, with its wide variability of climate and soil, is highly favourably placed for growing a large number of horticultural crops.
Livestock rearing contributes to climate change, but at the same time it brings many benefits to small-scale farmers. Do these benefits outweigh the disadvantages in terms of greenhouse gas emissions? And how can these emissions be reduced?
In order to meet increasing demands of food due to rising population and income, food production in India and other south Asian countries need to be increased. Rain-fed agriculture in India, practiced on 94 million hectares (M ha), is considered a major source of production increase in future.
In the drier areas of southern Africa, farmers experience drought once every two to three years. Relief agencies have traditionally responded to the resulting famines by providing farmers with enough seed and inorganic fertilizer to enable them to re-establish their cropping enterprises. However, because of the lack of appropriate land and crop management interventions, vulnerable farmers are not necessarily able to translate these relief investments in seeds and fertilizer into sustained gains in
productivity and incomes.
A report riles industrial farming nations and agribusiness The us, Canada and Australia have rejected an International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (iaastd), which believes there should be a shift in practising agriculture, to a
Excessive use of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides has affected soil and water quality in the Jaffna peninsula, Sri Lanka. Students from the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Jaffna have been learning about green manures from farmers, and how they have been used to improve soils. Green manures were also used successfully to rehabilitate salinated soils affected by the tsunami. These and other organic practices are now being promoted with and by farmers.
Integrating cover crops and green manures helps farmers rehabilitate degraded soils in highland areas. In Ecuador, farmers experimented with this conservation practice. They found that it improved their farming system in many ways: increased productivity in their main crop, decreased weeding time, provided them with an extra crop (for food, fodder, marketing), besides rehabilitating their soils.
