Effect of Live Mulch on Soil Temperature, Moisture, Weed Biomass and Lac Yield in Eastern India

摘要

Advances in agriculture through recent innovations and technology flow along with huge demand of food grains by mushrooming human population remarkably transformed the agriculture from traditional to contemporary with complete dependence on external inputs of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Though intensive agriculture aimed on high production through inorganic means increased agricultural yield by many folds, but contributed significandy to environmental degradation including green house forcing. The relevance of sustainable agriculture emerged in response to the questions raised on soil health, environment and livelihood security issues, reviving the traditional practices of soil conservation in the form of cover crop technology during the past few decades. Owing to these issues, there is paradigm shift in agriculture from productivity to sustainability. Sustainable agriculture means an integrated approach to increasing farm yield and managing resources in order to address all three critical aspects of sustainability: economic, environmental and social. Integrated farming systems (IFS) stabilize income through natural resource management and livelihood diversification. The IFS approach has multiple objectives of sustainability, food security, farmer security and poverty reduction. In fact, integrated farming system will play very effective role in the utilization of the natural resources in most rational manner or sustained crop diversification of farm enterprises which have less demand on space and time with very limited resources especially in rain fed area. Lac has good potential to be included in Agro-forestry as it is relatively low cash and labour input crop with high returns; compatible with existing rural livelihood activities in terms of its labour requirement and encourages conservation of host trees and leads to a re-greening of land.