Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Soil
Conserve
Sustainable
intensification
Enhance
Soil structure
FIGURE 16.1
Strategies of sustainable intensification of smallholder agriculture.
16.3 ISSUES OF SMALLHOLDER FARMING
Despite its global significance and the impact on lives of >2 billion people, small-
holder agriculture has numerous issues that need to be addressed through sustain-
able intensification. Low agronomic productivity has created a poverty trap for its
practitioners, which can only be broken by enhancing crop yields and profitability
through sustainable intensification. Increasing agronomic production is also essen-
tial to ensuring food and nutritional security of the resource-poor households.
Over and above the issues pertaining to the human dimensions (e.g., alleviating
poverty and advancing food/nutritional security), there are numerous environmental
issues. Indeed, the extractive agriculture practiced by resource-poor small landholders
is a major determinant/control of soil/environmental degradation. Deforestation,
biomass burning, and cultivation of agriculturally marginal lands by the small
landholders lead to loss of biodiversity, accelerated erosion, transport of pollutants
and sediments into natural water, and transforming state of the agroecosystems to
beyond the safe planetary boundaries (Röckstrom et al. 2009). Any new expansion of
agriculture that may be occurring in ecologically sensitive ecoregions,
viz
the tropi-
cal rainforest (Foley et al. 2011), must be avoided.
Thus, an appropriate strategy is to enhance productivity, bridge the yield gap,
and improve use efficiency of inputs through adoption of the BMPs for sustainable
intensification. Increasing productivity per unit of land area and inputs (e.g., water,
fertilizers, energy) would also reduce and avoid gaseous emissions (Burney et al.
2010). Thus, the strategies of promoting adoption of the BMPs of sustainable inten-
sification by resource-poor farmers are to (i) reduce soil erosion; (ii) conserve and
recycle water and nutrients; (iii) enhance soil fertility through integrated nutrient
management involving a judicious combination of organic amendments, inorganic
fertilizers, biological N fixation, and mycorrhizal inoculation; (iv) improve soil qual-
ity through C sequestration as humus and secondary carbonates while increasing the
activity and species diversity of soil fauna and flora, and strengthening the disease-
suppressive properties of soils; (v) reduce emissions of N
2
O (NO
x
) and increase CH
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