Producing more from less: How Indian agriculture has grown with limited ‘factors of production’

Subject : Economy

Section: National Income

Introduction:

In agriculture, there are four “factors of production”: Land, water, labour and energy.
Farmers use these factors or inputs to produce crops. For a given level of technology, the output produced by them is largely determined by the quantity of inputs used.
In the pre-Green Revolution era, agricultural production was primarily limited by the extent and quality of land available for cultivation.
The extent of land under agriculture:
- India’s farm sector grew by an average 2.8% a year during 1950-51 to 1961-62. The driver was expansion in the land brought under the plough. The country’s net sown area rose from 118.75 lakh to 135.40 lakh hectares (lh) over this period.
Quality of land:
- Agricultural land quality is a function of soil fertility and water availability.
- The alluvial soils in the Indo-Gangetic plains and the Kaveri, Krishna, Godavari and Mahanadi deltas of the eastern coast are the most fertile, followed by the black cotton soils of the Deccan, Malwa and Saurashtra plateaus. These yield more crops per acre than the lands with red, brown, laterite, mountain and desert soils, ranking in descending order of fertility.
Water availability is dependent on both rainfall and access to irrigation from rivers, lakes, tanks and ponds.

Factors of technology:

There are considered to be four factors of technology. They together enable more efficient use of the factors of production and result in higher yields – more produce from the same acre of land or number of labourers – besides better utilisation of water resources and replacement of animal and human power with mechanical and electrical power.
They are: Genetics, Crop nutrition, Crop protection and Agronomic interventions.

Genetics:

It is about seeds and plant breeding.
It offers many desirable traits in plants like disease and pest resistance, drought and heat stress tolerance, nutrient use efficiency or even stem sturdiness and erect/compact canopy to allow mechanical harvesting.

Crop nutrition:

Farmyard manure – the decomposed mixture of dung and urine along with other farm residues – contains 0.5% nitrogen (N), 0.2% phosphorous (P) and 0.5% potassium (K) on average.
Chemical fertilisers have much higher NPK content: Urea (46% N), di-ammonium phosphate (18% N and 46% P) and muriate of potash (60% K).
Synthetic fertilisers, in combination with the breeding of varieties responsive to high nutrient doses, led to a soaring of crop yields.

Crop protection:

It signifies defending plants against insect pests, pathogens (fungi, bacteria and viruses) and weeds, from the time of their sowing to harvesting and marketing.
Crop protection chemicals are aimed at ensuring that the yield gains from genetics/breeding and nutrition/fertilisers are realised, to the maximum possible extent, in farmers’ fields. Some are labour-saving like Herbicides, which can replace the manual removal of weeds.

Agronomic interventions:

These are- tractors, rotavators and reversible mould board ploughs that can do deep tillage, mixing and pulverisation of the soils and break their hardpan layers.
Water-saving technologies – drip irrigation and laser land levellers (which help in uniform placement of seed and fertiliser too) – and intercropping or growing more than one crop simultaneously on the same piece of land.

More from same or less:

The net sown area in India rose by just 3.3% – from 135.4 lh to 139.9 lh – between 1961-62 and 2019-20, as against 14% during 1950-51 to 1961-62.
The annual growth in gross value added from agriculture and allied activities during the period from 2005-06 to 2021-22, at 3.7%, has been the highest among all phases.