Sustainable land use can boost farm productivity
In between rows of trees, farmers can cultivate a diverse range of crops, including vegetables, grains and herbs. These intercrops benefit a lot from the shade provided by the trees, especially during the summer season. The tree roots prevent excessive evaporation of moisture from the soil, ensuring more efficient use of water resources and enhancing land productivity. Trees support beneficial microorganisms, reducing the need for chemical fertilisers and thereby boosting natural pest control.
Agroforestry has the potential to double or even treble farmers’ income in degraded, neglected or even fallow areas. High-input farming practices and the intensive use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides have contributed to land degradation. One way to resolve the problem is the adoption of agroforestry by farmers, at least in hilly, fallow and rainfed areas or on around 10 per cent of the agricultural land.
Agroforestry is a sustainable land-use management system that combines the cultivation of trees, crops and/or livestock on the same piece of land. It is a practice that integrates forestry and agriculture, aiming to generate income from both while minimising a negative environmental impact. India had adopted the National Agroforestry Policy in 2014. It defined agroforestry as a land-use system which integrates trees and shrubs on farmlands and rural landscapes to enhance productivity, profitability, diversity and ecosystem sustainability. With an appropriate mix of species, agroforestry enables agricultural land to withstand extreme weather events such as floods and droughts and enhance farmers’ income. The National Forest Policy (1988) was aimed at forest coverage of 33 per cent of the total geographical area; as of now, only around 22 per cent of the area is under forest cover. There is little scope for increasing the area under forests; hence, that gap can be filled by expanding the area under agroforestry.
In between rows of trees, farmers can cultivate a diverse range of crops, including vegetables, grains and herbs. These intercrops benefit a lot from the shade provided by the trees, especially during the summer season. The tree roots prevent excessive evaporation of moisture from the soil, ensuring a more efficient use of water resources and enhancing land productivity.
Some of the frequently grown tree species in agroforestry are neem, teak, eucalyptus, poplar, bamboo, amla, drumstick, banyan, peepal and acacia. These species are useful for medicinal purposes and repelling insects; they also provide timber and plywood. As per estimates, 65 per cent of the country’s timber requirement is met from the trees grown on farms.
Agroforestry plays a significant role in mitigating climate change and increasing land fertility and productivity by carbon fixation. Trees absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and act as carbon sinks. Agroforestry contribute to carbon sequestration and can offset greenhouse gas emissions. The atmospheric carbon fixation of agroforestry is on an average more than 15 tonnes of carbon/hectare/year, while cropping systems such as rice-wheat fix only less than 0.3 tonnes. Hence, carbon fixation can be achieved by shifting from lower biomass land use (e.g. grasslands) to tree-based systems such as agroforestry. Carbon sequestration in Indian agroforests varies from 19.56 tonnes/hectare/year in Uttar Pradesh to 23.46-47.36 tonnes in tree-bearing arid agro-ecosystems of Rajasthan.
Trees support beneficial microorganisms, reducing the need for chemical fertilisers and thereby enhancing natural pest control. The combination of trees and crops allows for diversified income from timber, fruits, nuts, medicinal plants and honey. Agroforestry can also create employment opportunities, contributing to rural development. Field experiments have shown that net returns from sole cropping systems such as sorghum-berseem rose from Rs 2 lakh/hectare/year to Rs 17-22 lakh with the inclusion of poplar in the land-use system.
There are many constraints which need to be overcome to increase the area under agroforestry. The effective returns of trees in agroforestry systems comes after 3-4 years after plantation; this is inconvenient for small and marginal farmers as well as tenant farmers, who are unable to make upfront investment and can’t wait long to get returns. Hence, there is a need for banks to make arrangements to finance initial upfront investments during the initial years. Once financial constraints are removed, the key issue is the availability of suitable fast-growing seedlings and planting material and also technical knowledge, which needs to be provided by the government or the private extension system.
The government should incentivise the establishment of agroforestry Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs), public-private partnerships, timber and forestry-based companies and agroforestry consultants.
The demand for agroforestry products is scattered and dominated by a few traders who indulge in exploitative practices. The government needs to take active steps for the development of agroforestry-based markets for timber, fruits, medicinal plants and non-timber forest products in an organised way. The success of the National Bamboo Mission needs to be replicated, wherever feasible.
There is the Minimum Support Price (MSP) regime for most crops, but agroforestry products lack such policy support. Hence, the profitability varies significantly from season to season because of wide fluctuations in yield and prices. The government should identify some agroforestry products under the ‘one district, one product’ programme and develop value chains, processing plants and post-harvest infrastructure for a product in the district.
Agroforestry holds the key to ecological and economic sustainability of the land. The sector should be encouraged by removing bottlenecks across the value chain.
The author is section head, Design & Analysis, ICAR-Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture, Hyderabad. Views are personal
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