AGRO FORESTRY

AGRO FORESTRY

TOPIC: Environment

Context- There is an immense need for crop diversification and role of agroforestry due to series of adversities and climatic vagaries during agricultural production, such as erratic rainfall, stone hail, drought, flood, and so on.

Concept-

Agroforestry:

• Agroforestry is a land-use system that includes trees, crops and / or livestock in a spatial and temporal manner, balancing both ecological and economic interactions of biotic and abiotic components.
• It harnesses the complementarity between trees and crops for efficient utilisation of available resources.
• Agroforestry can generate food, feed, fruits, fibre, fuel, fodder, fish, flavour, fragrance, floss, gum and resins as well as other non-wood products for food and nutritional security. It can also support livelihoods and promote productive, resilient agricultural environments in all ecologies.
• Agroforestry is an important land-use system for diversification around the world in different spheres of biological, ecological, economical and sociological considerations.
• The major agroforestry practices in India include multifunctional improved fallows, home gardens, plantation crop-based mixed-species production systems, alley cropping, woodlots, windbreaks, protein banks, shifting cultivation and Taungya in different regions.
• Agroforestry enhances biodiversity due to the creation of diverse habitat for macro- and micro-organisms and maintaining landforms for future generations.
• The integrated farming system is an offshoot of agroforestry, advocating the diversification of the agri-production with other associated secondary and tertiary agriculture practices. The role of micro-organisms, nitrogen-fixing trees, leaf litter decomposition, forest hydrology and nutrient fluxes in agroforestry is well known to promote the crop diversification with various under utilised and wild crops.

Crop diversification:

• Crop diversification is a strategy applied to grow more diverse crops from shrinking land resources with an increase in productivity in the same arable land.
• Traditional pattern of agriculture in India has wider crop diversity eg. In the Garhwal Himalayan region of India, Barahnaja is a crop diversification system for cultivating 12 crops in a year. ‘Barahanaaj’ literally means ‘12 foodgrains’ and is the traditional heritage of the area.