Untitled

• All living organisms require food for body development, growth, and health.
• Plants and animals serve as major food sources.
• Efforts are continuously being made to improve production from agriculture and animal husbandry.

Reasons for Improving Production

• Necessary due to India's large and growing population.
• Current production levels are insufficient to meet future food demands.
• There is limited scope for increasing land under cultivation.

Green and White Revolutions

• Increased food-grain production.
• The white revolution led to better and more efficient milk availability.
• Natural resources are used more intensively.
• Increased risk of damage to natural resources and ecological balance.

Sustainable Practices

• Increasing food production is important without harming the environment.
• Need for sustainable practices in agriculture and animal husbandry.
• Simply increasing grain production does not address malnutrition and hunger.
• Food security requires both availability and affordability.
• Agriculture is the main livelihood for a majority of the population.
• Increasing incomes of those working in agriculture combats hunger.
• Scientific management practices must be employed for high farm yields.
• Combining agriculture with livestock, poultry, fisheries, or bee-keeping promotes sustained livelihood.

Ways to Increase Crop and Livestock Yields

• Improving crop yields and livestock is important.
• Cereals like wheat, rice, maize, millets, and sorghum provide carbohydrates.
• Pulses like gram, pea, black gram, green gram, pigeon pea, and lentil provide protein.
• Oil seeds including soyabean, ground nut, sesame, castor, mustard, linseed, and sunflower provide necessary fats.
• Vegetables, spices, and fruits offer vitamins and minerals, plus small amounts of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.
• Fodder crops like berseem, oats, or sudan grass are raised as food for livestock.

Crop Seasons

• Kharif season is from June to October, and some crops are grown in the winter.
• The Rabi season is from November to April.
• Kharif crops include paddy, soyabean, pigeon pea, maize, cotton, green gram, and black gram.
• Rabi crops include wheat, gram, peas, mustard, and linseed.
• Increase in food grain production is achieved through practices in farming.
• Three stages include choice of seeds, nurturing crop plants, and protecting crops from loss.

Groups of Activities for Yield Improvement

• Crop variety improvement.
• Crop production improvement.
• Crop protection management.

Crop Variety Improvement

• Finding varieties that give a good yield.
• Strains of crops are selected by breeding for desirable characteristics.
• Examples Disease resistance, response to fertilizers, product quality, and high yields.
• Hybridization involves crossing genetically different plants.
• The types of crossing are intervarietal, interspecific, or intergeneric.
• Another method uses introducing a gene for the desired characteristic.
• This results in genetically modified crops.
• New crop varieties must produce high yields under different conditions.
• Farmers need good quality seeds of these particular varieties.

Factors for Variety Improvement

• Higher yield: Increasing crop productivity per acre.
• Improved quality: Varies by crop like baking quality in wheat, protein in pulses, oil in oilseeds.
• Biotic and abiotic resistance: Helping protect crops from insects and weather.
• Change in maturity duration: Farmers have more time to grow crops.
• Wider adaptability: Stabilizes crop production under different conditions.
• Desirable agronomic characteristics: Creating tallness for fodder crops reduces nutrients in cereal crops.

Crop Production Management

• Farming varies scale across countries, including India.
• All farmers are impacted by land, money, and access to knowledge
• The farmers purchasing capacity for inputs defines cropping system and production practices.
• Production practices occur at levels of no cost, low cost, and high cost.

Nutrient Management

• Plants require nutrients for growth, supplied by air, water, and soil.
• Air provides carbon and oxygen; water supplies hydrogen.
• Soil supplies thirteen nutrients to plants, broken into Macronutrients and Micronutrients.
• Macronutrients - Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulphur
• Micronutrients - Iron, manganese, boron, zinc, copper, molybdenum, and chlorine
• Lack of these nutrients affects the plant's processes, including reproduction, growth, and potential disease.
• Soil enrichment happens by supplying nutrients in the form of manure and fertilizers.

Manure

• Contains organic matter and small quantities of nutrients.
• Prepares through the decaying of animal and plants
• Enhances the soil with elements and improves soil fertility.
• Bulk matter in manure helps enhance improving the soil structure.
• Manure increases water retention in sandy soils and drainage in clayey soils.
• Manure protects environment from excessive use of fertilizers.
• Biological waste material recycles farm waste.
• Compost and vermi-compost include livestock waste, vegetable, animal, domestic, and sewage waste etc. decomposed to pit known as composition
• This mix is then used to generate plant and animal refuse.
• Vermi-compost uses earthworms to quicken the process.
• Green manure uses sun hemp or guar, and mulches green plants which helps add nitrogen and phosphorus.

Fertilizers

• These are commercially made nutrients for plants that supply nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
• They grow plant growth giving rise to plants.
• Fertilizers are key high-cost farming
• Fertilisers should be observed their timing so they can utilize excessive irrigation and be fully absorbed to prevent water pollution.
• Long-term, can damage soil fertility and harms that impact replenishment of nutrients.

Irrigation

• Most agriculture in India depends on timely monsoons and sufficient rainfall.
• Poor monsoons cause crop failure and ensuring crops at the right stages increases yields.
• Many measures bring agricultural land under irrigation.

Sources of Irrigation

• Wells: Dug wells and tube wells collect water.
• Canals: Receive from one or more reservoirs or rivers, divided into distributaries.
• River Lift Systems: Draw water from rivers where canal flow is insufficient.
• They Supplement irrigation in areas close to rivers.
• Tanks: Store small reservoirs which intercept and store run-off.
• Rainwater harvesting and watershed management increase available water.
• These involve building check-dams to raise ground water levels and reduce soil erosion.

Cropping Patterns

• Mixed cropping grows crops simultaneously on the same land, that reduces risk.
• Inter-cropping growing two crops on same field in definite pattern.
• Crop rotation growing succession crop to give harvests.

Crop Protection Management

• Field crops are infested by weeds, insects, pests, and diseases.
• Weeds are unwanted plants in the cultivated field.
• This can be controlled by herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides.
• Use of mechanical removal crop rotation and planting seed beds helps reduce weeds.
• Diseases in plants caused by bacteria transmitted through the soil water and air need to be addressed.

Animal Husbandry

• The management of animal livestock.
• Includes feeding, breeding, and disease control.
• Animal-based farming includes like cattle, goat, sheep, poultry, and fish farming.
• The population increases this increase demand for milk, eggs and meat.
• Improving animal based products helps livestock limitations.

Cattle Farming

• Done to provide milk and provide draught labor.
• Milk-producing females are called milch animals, and the cows are from draught animals from labor.
• Milk production depends, to some extent, on lactation length and increasing this can help increase milk production.
• Foreign breeds are selected for periods of milk production.
• Indigenous Sahiwal breeds excel in disease resistance
• Cross the two for the best qualities.
• They should also be sheltered where its is cool and shady.
• Dietary requirements need animals need constant maintenance as well.
• Balanced rations are a key component in cattle.
• The cattle often receive health problems, however, often feed and posture are helpful with preventing this.

Poultry Farming

• Undertaken to raise domestic fowl for egg production and chicken meat.
• Improving poultry breeds produce layers for eggs and broilers for meat.
• The cross-breeding programmes between indigenous and foreign breed is key.
• Desirable traits like quality and summer adaptation is key.
• Poultry can often suffer from different disease and nutritional deficiencies.
• This necessitates need for disinfection for poultry.

Egg and Broiler Production

• Broiler chickens can be fed well with vitamins and can increase supplement feed for rate and efficiency.
• Care to ensure feathering, mortality.
• A housing, nutritional and environmental requirements.

Fish Production

• A source of fish used for our food consumption.
• Sourced from natural resources like culture finding or fish farming.

Marine Fisheries

• Coastal fisheries include 7500 km of ocean.
• Many varieties include sardines or Bombay ducks.
• Some fish include seaweed or pearls as well.
• Fish can include shrimp as well and oysters.
• Short term benefits of fisheries get depleted because fish demand more need production.

Inland Fisheries

• Fresh water resources include canals ponds and rivers.
• Combine with rice crop.

Bee-Keeping

• Honey has grown into a large scale agricultural business
• Is source with high yield and wax.
• The quality of honey can impact value or quality.