| Details of Innovation |
Farmer's region receives an annual rainfall of less than 25-40 cm. He belongs to a joint family consisting of more than 35 members. All members take a keen interest in experimenting in agriculture and agroforestry. His uncle has kept a record of more than 35 parameters of weather and agricultural practices. The family collectively owns 17 hectares of land. After completing his education, he began farming on his small family farm, foregoing 2 to 3 job offers in the early seventies. He has been experimenting on various techniques of dryland farming since the last 15 years and has successfully developed a unique method of tree-planting for dry regions.
His endeavours brought 2 phenomena to his notice:, viz.
i) evapo-transpiration through weeds and,
ii) upward movement of water due to capillary action in soil, are the major causes of water loss from the soil. If these losses are prevented, the soil can retain sufficient water even for a tree even in dry regions. In 1982, he conducted a systematic experiment on different soil-types to validate his observations. He measured the moisture content of soil from 10 different places at different depths in each plot and found the following:
(i) In all types of soil, moisture to the depth of 30 cm. is lost due to evaporation, irrespective of soil management practices like weeding and ploughing.
(ii) Below 30 cm., the moisture content of weed-free and ploughed plots was almost twice than in the control plot.
Based on these findings, he designed a technique of farming in drylands ie. levelling the field to prevent rainwater runoff, which is in complete contrast with what the forest department and other institutions.
Two weeks after the first rain, ploughing is carried out to remove weeds; it also helps in breaking capillaries in the upper soil layer. This checks the upward capillary movement of water. The field is ploughed again two weeks before the end of the rainy season. The seedlings that are selected for planting are kept in bags for 3 days and care is taken to water them. They are then planted in 60-70 cm.deep pits in such a way that their root zone remains 30 cm. below the soil layer. After planting, approximately 1lt. of water is poured into the pit and the plant is left to mature. He has successfully grown thousands of Eucalyptus, Ber (Zizyphus spp), Ardu (Ailanthus excelsa), Australian babul, Sisam (Dalbergia sisoo), Neem(Azadirachta indica), Amla etc. through this technique. Trees planted by this method have survived one of the worst droughts that occurred in the period 1986-88. While explaining the logic of his technique, Sunda Ram says that plants which survive the stress in the first two weeks after planting, will survive any kind of stress. He has successfully demonstrated this technique on a plot of land provided by the forest department about 3km.away from his village. Many neighbouring large farmers have adopted this method on their farm, while small farmers have adopted it on farm boundaries. He was the first person in his region to introduce the concept of agroforestry on non-irrigated lands in an arid region. He says there is no research on this aspect in scientific institutions. Based on this method, the Khejari (Prosopis cineraria) tree still exists in dry lands and is used for fuel. farmer was a pioneer in his area for growing the fast-growing species, locally called Ardu, which is used as fuel. He plans to persuade pastoralists, who keep small ruminants on common land, to grow Ardu trees on their small non-irrigated rain-fed plots. |
Honey Bee Network Knowledge & Innovation Database (HBNKIND)
