Indoor housing is a convenient practice for raising livestock. If stalls are constructed in an appropriate way, they can fulfill several functions. This practice describes in detail how to construct a goat shed and a feeding trough. The feeding trough is constructed outside the stall, making it easier to clean...

Usually, there is a common practice to raise green manure as an intercrop in sugarcane and to incorporate it as mulch 45 to 50 days after sowing. The present practice, however, shows a modified method by introducing some practices based on close observations in a sugarcane production site in Tamil...

Pulse panchayat is an integrated approach in establishing a sustainable production, value addition and marketing system. The initiative implemented by a Farmer Producer Company in Tamil Nadu, is moving towards achieving self-sufficiency in pulse production.

For the past half century agricultural innovation has denied a voice to the many groups who work outside the profession of science – farmers, food providers, women and the urban poor. The value of their expertise gained through practical experience must be recognised in the production and validation of knowledge....

Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) is a set of farming methods, and also a grassroots peasant movement, which has spread to various states in India. It has attained wide success in southern India, especially the southern Indian state of Karnataka where it first evolved.  The movement in Karnataka state was...

The share of uncultivated foods from the forest has gradually declined in the diets of Paharia tribes in Jharkhand. Initiatives like conservation, preservation, processing of uncultivated foods has helped them regain their position and enhance the dietary diversity of the communities, also addressing the issues of hunger and malnutrition.

Floods, droughts, heat waves, cold spells, and other natural disasters are large sources of risk for farmers. For instance, in semiarid areas of India, 89 percent of farming households cited drought as the largest risk to agricultural production. Climate change may make weather patterns more extreme and unpredictable, further exposing...

Tubers, pulses and millets are important for the livelihoods and nutrition of poor farmers, especially in fragile regions. These crops are not only underutilized, but are also under researched. Ama Sangathan, a women federation consisting of 1200 indigenous women, have revived these crops in two blocks in Odisha, by their...

This practice focuses on facilitating the nursery germination and plantation of the “Malabar Neem” (Melia dubia), which is locally known as “Malaivembu”. The tree is found in forest plantations in India and is a fast growing tree crop with up to 20 m height. It produces greater bio-mass in a...

This practice describes how moringa plant can be propagated by air layering to promote vegetative propagation of trees and produce seedlings. Farmers nowadays might prefer propagation of moringa through air-layered cuttings rather than through seed propagation because through vegetative propagation the air layered seedlings represent the characteristics of selected mother...

Fodder sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) is used for feeding animals in the drylands of India. The forage crop is sown in an intercropping system along with staple crops. The intercropping of the forage sorghum between other crops additionally improves the land-use efficiency, providing diversified yields within a specified area of...

In agroecology, farmers continuously build situation-specific knowledge that allows them to develop under unpredictable and changing circumstances. There are no  fixed prescriptions in agroecology about how to produce, process, market or store food, feed, medicine and fibre. Rather, different practices work in different ways depending on each specific context and ecosystem....

This book on Economics of Land Degradation and Improvement provides with valuable knowledge and information both at the global, regional, and national levels on the costs of land degradation and benefits of taking action against land degradation. A key advantage of this book is that it goes beyond the conventional...

Revival of agro biodiversity that characterizes traditional agriculture is crucial for addressing food and nutrition security. Bringing back millets, pulses, coarse cereals etc. into the cropping systems can help fill the nutritional gap that is ever widening in the present rural communities.

This five-year project (2012-2017) aims to strengthen biocultural innovation for food security in the face of climate change, in China, India, Kenya and Peru. Much of the world's agrobiodiversity has been lost in the last century due to the spread of modern agriculture. Only about 30 crops now provide 95% of...

The Adivasi communities of Odisha, India, have experienced substantial losses of many natural resources from their area, which are key elements ensuring their food and livelihood security. Many farmers from the Adivasi communities have lost diverse varieties of traditional local crops like millet based mix crops while trying out market...

The key issues that this volume addresses are innovations in organizational and institutional arrangements that have enabled the creation of local markets for sustainably farmed agricultural products or, rather, “institutional innovations”. Institutional innovations can be described as new rules and forms of interactions. They help redefine sustainable practices locally and...

The significance and value of local and traditional farmers’ knowledge on improving agricultural practices is gaining more and more recognition. Participatory Guarantee Systems have been shown to hold great potential, to encourage knowledge sharing between farmers, and thus contribute to nurturing farmers’ knowledge.

Livestock rearing practices have changed enormously in the last 25 years. ANTHRA in Andhra Pradesh has taken initiatives to preserve the local knowledge on livestock rearing by documenting the practices and wisdom of the tribal, pastoralists and the women in the communities, with the hope that they could be used...

The two studies in this report explore these issues further using empirical quantitative surveys as well as qualitative fieldwork from a cross-section of developing economies in South and SouthEast Asia. The first study is an empirical investigation of the digital gender divide amongst the poor (broadly called the Bottom of...