Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
7.1 INTRODUCTION
Agriculture is highly dependent on environment, and it's very difficult
to get favorable climatic conditions for crop growth and development as
per crop need. Agriculture is basically climate/season based, a hot and
humid climatic conditions characterized in rainy and post rainy season
is most favorable for both crop and crop enemies. To raise a healthy dis-
ease free crop spring-summer seasons was counted as most suitable. But,
fast climatic changes happening across the globe has changed climatic
characteristics of a season, which has resulted in untimely rains and other
fluctuations in the spring-summer season, raising the challenge to develop
climate resilient technologies. Not even that, with time extreme hot and
cold temperature stresses have been noticed in geographically varied loca-
tions where it was not supposed to be earlier based on various geographi-
cal factors deciding the climatic conditions of that area. Therefore, there is
need to develop suitable varieties and technologies to sustain these chal-
lenges whichmay come up in form of various biotic and abiotic factors
(Singh, 2013). Vegetable cultivation is an awesome business in India, but
under open field conditions by following traditional cultivation practices
it is difficult to manage various abiotic and biotic stresses. These stresses
not only reduce productivity levels but they are also responsible for poor
quality specifically during rainy and post rainy season. Mostly to manage
biotic stresses farmers spray large amount of different chemicals, this not
only enhances the cost of cultivation but it also increases residual toxicity
in the freshly produced vegetables, which is ultimately hazardous to hu-
man health.
How to address these issues, can we manipulate the climatic conditions
or can we provide protection to the crops against climatic fluctuations and
various other related stresses. Yes, protected cultivation technology has the
answer to this but, it's a tricky technology highly depending upon intel-
ligent implementation of protected structures for vegetable cultivation by
having a knowhow on “
What, When, Where and Why
”
to
implement. Ev-
ery protected structure has its own limitations and advantages (Singh and
Kalia, 2005), but the basic benefit is its extra protective shelter restricting
or minimizing the exposure of the crops to various adverse factors, which
are high in open conditions. Even though the application of chemicals
for controlling biotic stresses is also low under protected structures which
gives a high quality safe vegetables for human consumption. By using
