Attributes of Farm Income Operating on Conservation Agriculture: TheMultivariate and ANN Analytics

Abstract

Conservation agriculture (CA) is the combination of environmental management, modernand scientific agriculture, which employs farmers’ ability to utilize, innovate, and adapt tochanging situations, as well as their holistic acceptance of knowledge along with ensuringsustainability. Farm-level adoption of CA is related to reduced labour and agricultural inputs,more consistent yields, and increased soil nutrient exchange capacity. A good quality landyields good results to everyone, confers good health on the entire family, and causes growthof money, cattle, and grain. The present study depicts hard evidences by identifying markervariables impacting income augmentation through conservation agriculture. A score of 50farmers has been selected from two blocks of Cooch Behar district of West Bengal, bynon-probability snowballing sampling techniques with a total of eighteen independentvariables along with income from major crop is used as the dependent variable through astructured interview schedule. A basket of multivariate analytical techniques has been appliedalong with Artificial Neural Network (ANN) as well. The results depict that a blend ofdiversified farming and farming experiences in CA contributed immensely to scale up incomefrom conservation agriculture approaches.

Conservation agriculture based crop management practices impact diversity and population dynamics of the insect-pests and their natural enemies in agroecosystems

“…Basically, conservation agriculture is a resource-conserving system of agricultural crop production (Nandan et al, 2018;Lal, 2020) that requires minimum soil disturbance, maintains permanent soil cover, and focuses on diversified crop rotation, all of which contribute to improved soil health and higher productivity (Thierfelder et al, 2018; Figure 1). It is merely a combination of commonly used management principles that can help ensure more sustainable agricultural production (Shrestha et al, 2020;Nandan et al, 2021;Saha et al, 2022). At the same time, it is a noble strategy to address issue of soil quality deterioration (Nyirenda and Balaka, 2021) and climate change impacts on agricultural production (Scopel et al, 2013;Yadav et al, 2017).…”

A Tool to Measure the Attitude of Farmers Toward Conservation Agriculture

“…Conservation agriculture is impactful in lowering land and water pollution, soil erosion, and long-term reliance on external inputs (Saha et al, 2022). It also improves environmental management, increases water quality and water use efficiency, and decreases greenhouse gas emissions by reducing fossil fuel consumption and enhancing the soil carbon sink.…”

Understanding Conservation Agriculture in terms of Knowledge, Perception and Application

“…CA has been proven to be more knowledge-intensive than input-intensive, and its success is determined by the farmer's activities rather than the number of inputs used. (Saha et al, 2022). The traditional knowledge of the farmers also plays a crucial role in practising sustainable crop production (Lenka & Satpathy, 2020) also the factors of knowledge are equally important (Ravikumar et al, 2015).…”