2-Economic Advantages of CASI

Transcript

Hello friends. This has been fully proven that conservation agriculture is a very beneficial technique of farming. But the most important thing for farmers is the economic advantage of a farming technique. Today we will discuss this aspect and look into the various cost savings that come with the adoption of conservation agriculture when compared to traditional way of farming.

Various research studies have been conducted in different locations on conservation agriculture. There will be minor variations in the findings of these studies but all of them show that conservation agriculture is beneficial. We conducted research in the Eastern gangetic plains of India, Nepal and Bangladesh for all types of cropping systems like rice-wheat system, rice-maize system, rice-lentil system or rice-jute system. We found various advantages of conservation agriculture. The overall result of our findings was that CASI is more beneficial than conventional tilling.

To understand it better we look at this graph. There are four treatments. T1 represents conventional tillage meaning puddled transplanted rice after which rabi crops like wheat, maize or red lentil are sown on tilled plot. T2 represents puddled transplanted rice but the rabi crop is done through zero tillage. T3 represents DSR and then zero tillage for rabi crop. So this is a full CASI technique adapter. T4 represents UPTR meaning unpuddled transplanted rice and then rabi crop is grown with zero tillage.

These four categories were analyzed in nine different dimensions and it was found that CASI which is represented by T3 is the most beneficial in all dimensions. This was true for all the 9 dimensions of comparison like the system rice equivalent yield, cost of production savings,laboursavings, energy saving, irrigation water saving, gross margin, input water productivity, energy productivity and CO2 emission benefits. In all of these categories, you can see that T3 is the most beneficial. We have kept them in an index of values from 0 to 1. We can see that the most valuable is represented by the value 1 and least valuable are going towards the value 0.

The second best system after T3 is T4 i.e. unpuddled transplanted rice and zero tillage for rabi crop. It has the same benefits when it comes to water saving with other systems but in all the other parameters this system is more beneficial.

Then comes the T2 system where we did puddled transplanted rice followed by zero tillage for rabi crop.

In the end is conventional tillage system i.e. T1 and it is shown that the other three systems are more beneficial than the conventional T1 system.

Another study done by FAO has shown that we can from the time of land preparation to the time of crop establishment, save around 80% consumption of fuel if we are doing conservation agriculture. We save around 60% labour compared to conventional tillage in conservation agriculture. In our study of the 3 countries of Nepal, India and Bangladesh, we found that 40% cost can be reduced and 25% gross margin gain in conservation agriculture compared to conventional tillage.

Overall, farmers can save approximately a minimum of 2500 to 3000 rupees in conservation agriculture when compared to conventional tillage.

So friends, conservation agriculture is very beneficial for farmers. In times of climate change, conservation agriculture comes forward as a very good solution and it is also very beneficial for the farmer.