Why should farmers adopt sustainable agriculture practices?

Agricultural sustainability is imperative. The wisdom of farming that involves a sustainable link between soil health, biomass input through vegetation (crop and trees) and livestock manure has maintained the productivity of croplands, especially in smallholder tropical agricultural systems such as India. Through green revolution that happened globally and in India during the 1960s introduced the concept of synthetic fertilizers. Green revolution without doubt transitioned a young country into a food-secure economy. However, due to a combination of reasons, synthetic fertilizer application increased rapidly over the past five decades and concurrently, the use of organic manure and better ways of managing cropland soils dwindled.

To worsen the situation, climate change-induced global warming has affected earth system circulation and has resulted in drastic and erratic rainfall in the tropics. This is threatening agriculture and the way forward to sustainable agriculture is to adopt the traditional wisdom that is also naturally effective in imparting resilience to agricultural systems to climate change impacts. Moreover, sustainable agricultural practices improve farm economics in the long term. They also sequester carbon (in biomass and soil) as well as reduce greenhouse gas emissions (CH4 and N2O).

With emerging carbon markets and the global need to reduce emissions at the national level, transitions to sustainable agriculture can be rewarded with carbon credits.