Research Projects

The agriculture is largely dependent on climatic condition besides other inputs. Thus is it more prone to weather aberrations and climate change. Additionally, small and marginal farmers till majority of land in Indian farming whereas high cost of input, risk of crop failure due to aberrant weather, other biotic and abiotic stress puts their livelihood at stake. On the other hand decrease in soil organic carbon, declining soil biodiversity, excessive use of chemicals in crop production are emerging threats to sustainable food production, soil and environmental health. Under such conditions, different regenerative agriculture practices are advocated by the researchers to restore the soil health. In India, 48% of the land surface was classified as degraded due to processes such as erosion, acidification and salinization. The situation led to evolve a number of agricultural systems intended to be more sustainable alternatives to high-input conventional farming systems. Organic farming and more recently introduced natural farming practice aims to address both environmental and socio-economic concerns within the agricultural sector. Natural Farming advocated to use amendments from readily available household ingredients, which besides reducing cost of cultivation, promote soil health, nutrient cycling, and provide greater water retention in soil. Although many of the studies were conducted on organic farming in past, the potential of natural farming has not been thoroughly studied. Convincing the end users with facts backed by sufficient scientific data and evidence, may facilitate more rapid adoption of this practice. In addition, end user will have clarity on pros and cons of the technique to make a judgement on adoption based on resources and requirement of the farmers. With the hypothesis that, different regenerative farming techniques such as organic and natural farming will increase the microbial activity and diversity to the extent that the nutrient transformation will meet the crop demand and enrich the soil with organic carbon. To prove this study is proposed with objectives Objective1. To characterize different inputs used in organic and natural farming for its chemical and microbiological properties Objective2. To determine the different soil organic carbon pools and soil properties under different farming practices Objective3. To Study the microbial structural and functional diversity under conventional, natural and organic farming as affected by duration of experiment in different locations Objective 4. To estimate the soil microbial processes and nutrient transformation under different farming practices We plan to bring the soil samples from major soils under organic, natural and conventional farming from two depth and will study in detail the carbon content, nutrient status of soil, microbial diversity and overall soil quality using different chemical, biochemical, and genomic approaches.