Environment, Sustainable Agriculture and Allied Themes
This closing domain links farm practice to environmental outcomes: soil health, organic systems, residue management, water harvesting and climate resilience.
Core rules
- Sustainable agriculture balances productivity, profitability and resource conservation so that the resource base is not depleted for the next generation.
- Organic farming avoids synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, relying on compost, green manure, biofertilizers, crop rotation and biological control. Certification under NPOP and the Jaivik Bharat mark requires a conversion period, commonly about three years.
- Conservation agriculture rests on minimum soil disturbance, permanent residue cover and crop diversification.
- Integrated farming system combines crops with dairy, poultry, fishery or agroforestry so that waste from one enterprise becomes input for another.
- Agroforestry ( alley cropping, windbreaks, silvopasture) adds tree income, reduces erosion and sequesters carbon.
- Burning crop residue destroys organic carbon and soil microbes and causes air pollution; safe alternatives are incorporation, mulching, composting and use as fodder or fuel.
- Excess fertilizer and pesticide escape as leaching and runoff, causing nitrate contamination and eutrophication of water bodies.
Worked example
A gram crop fixes about 40 kg nitrogen per hectare. How much urea would supply the same nitrogen, and why is the credit useful? Reasoning: urea needed = 40 ÷ 0.46 ≈ 87 kg per hectare. In an INM plan this biological credit reduces the urea purchase, lowering cost and leaching risk; the credit is normally taken only for the following crop, not the legume itself.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling organic produce simply unsprayed produce; certification and conversion matter.
- Assuming zero tillage means no weed problem.
- Treating residue burning as harmless.
- Ignoring the pollution cost of excess fertilizer in a profitability calculation.