Conventional Technologies for Sustaining Food production

Farmer-innovated agro-technologies

Farmers have long practiced sustainable crop production by managing:

• Soil fertility management by recycling organic waste

• Green manuring

• Crop rotations

• Watershed management

• Pest control

Farmers are benefiting substantially from their own innovations – for example (Pretty and Hine,

2000).

• Home gardening with vegetables and fruit trees

• Adding new productive elements into agriculture such as fish in rice paddies

• Better use of water

• Improvement in yield through integrated pest management

Studies also found that farmers require more information on relationships between pests and

predators, plant growth and soil moisture, and crop and livestock. Social learning contributes

significantly to sustainable agriculture as well as to innovation and adoption of new ideas.The world is more food secure today largely as a result of development and deployment of highyielding varieties, fertilizers use, and irrigation. A significant achievement of the GreenRevolution was the stabilization of production and prices of food grains. Fluctuations in the food grains production have declined significantly in both irrigated and rainfed regions since 1980s(Pal et al. 1993; Pandey et al. 2000). The basic concepts of science, which made the Green Revolution a reality is still relevant today (Huang et al. 2002; Evans 2001). Green revolution catalyzed by CIMMYT and IRRI resulted in >70% of the world’s rice and wheat being planted to improved high yielding cultivars developed from breeding material supplied by IRRI and CIMMYT. Similarly the national programs globally have released around 500 cultivars (both varieties and hybrids) of sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea, pigeonpea and groundnut based on the germplasm and breeding material provided by ICRISAT.

Grey to Green Revolution: Research for Impact at ICRISAT

The researchers are now trying to make the Green Revolution more sustainable by introducing resource conservation technologies and greater diversification of farming systems. ICRISAT is working with partners to diversify cereal-based systems in South Asia with chickpea, pigeonpea, mungbean, lentil, and other legumes. Integration of legumes in rice-wheat system will also add “natural” fertilizer in the form of nitrogen-fixation. The introduction of short-duration pigeonpea developed at ICRISAT has helped to integrate legumes in crop rotations in Central India (Bantilan and Parthasarathy 1999). During the ‘Green revolution’, the environment was adapted/modified to skip the varieties by providing fertilizer and irrigation. However, if the rainfed areas have to benefit from R&D, adapting the crops to the environment will allow farmers to get more out of their natural resources, and manage these resources more efficiently, turn adversity into opportunity, and change the marginal grey areas to green. This ‘Grey-to-Green Revolution’ must aim at achieving maximum returns form marginal soils under rainfed conditions.