Dryland farming, current status, issues, practices, types of dryland agriculture, methods of dryland farming, water conservation, management of dryland, improving dryland productivity

1. Dry land farming
S. Ashokh Aravind
2020602004
1st year Ph. D scholar (Agronomy)
AGR 601- Current trends in Agronomy

2. World scenario
• One third of the world's population live in drylands, facing
huge stresses such as repetitive droughts and poor soil
fertility.
• Climate change will further worsen the situation.
• There is an urgent need to provide adapted and climate
smart solutions to millions of smallholder farmers to improve
their food security and resilience to such dryland stresses.

6. Need for Dryland Agriculture in India
• For the balanced development of country, dryland agriculture must be
emphasized.
• Dryland agriculture is based on the industrial crops e.g. cotton,
groundnut, oilseeds, pulses, tobacco. For development of agro processing
industries and to make Indian agriculture more export- oriented greater
emphasis on dryland agriculture is inevitable.
• Agriculture has forwarded and backward linkages with industry. Industrial
crops are produced in greater quantum, meso-scale, household, cottage
industries could be developed in rural areas and rural dev processes can be
propelled.
• Mostly produces hardy and nutritious crops eg. Jowar, bajra, ragi, pulses,
oilseeds, cottonseeds, sunflower, safflower.
• Dryland agriculture involves cash cropping, E.g. Jatropha cultivation can
reduce the magnitude of petroleum crisis
• Potential to produce fodder and cattle feed. Also, here the pasture lands
are more extensive and cattle breeds have greater per-capital yield.
• Sheep-raising has greater prospect in semi-arid areas.

7. Dry land agriculture or dry land farming?
On the basis of the main sources of moisture on soil, farming can be
classified into two types:
• Irrigated farming
• Non-Irrigated farming
Irrigated farming further divided into two types:
• Protective Irrigated farming
• Productive Irrigated farming
Irrigated farming further divided into two types:
• Wetland farming
• Dryland or dry farming

8. • In Protective irrigated farming, irrigation is done to protect crops
from the adverse effects of soil moisture, irrigation used as
supplementary sources of water over rainfall.
• In productive irrigation, irrigation is used for to provides sufficient
rainfall to achieve high productivity; higher water is used per unit
areas as compared to protective irrigation farming.
Non-Irrigated farming further divided into two types:
• Wetland farming
• Dryland farming or dry farming
• Wetland farming, areas having higher rainfall as compared to
required soil moisture in the rainy season. For example, Rice, Jute,
Sugarcane crops are cultivated through wetland farming.
• Dryland or dry farming is a cultivation method used in drought-prone
areas having rainfall less than 75 cm annually.

10. Significance of dry farming in drought-prone areas:
• 75 % of farmers are in dryland areas are a small and marginal farmer
and they are doing subsistence agriculture
• It is the source of the larger portion of agriculture employability
• The majority of crops such as Bajra, Maize, Ragi, Oilseed, Jowar,
Cotton, 30 % of total rice production are done through dry farming
methods.
• Dry farming is needed in drought-prone areas to stop desertification.
Challenges:
• Low and uncertain rainfall leads to crop failure
• Larger maturity duration crops are not suitable in the dry region that
resulted in poor yield
• Poor nitrogen and phosphorous contents in drought-prone areas.

11. Desertification
Desertification is accelerating in dryland regions due in part to
repetitive drought, unsustainable soil management and overgrazing.

14. Dryland areas include:
• Areas having low rainfall less than 75 cm annually
• Arid Region
• Semi-arid region
• Sub Humid region
• Uncertain or erratic rainfall areas
• No assured irrigation
Dryland areas in India:
Rajasthan, Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Marathawada, and
Vidharbha region of Maharastra, Bundelkhand, most part of northern
and central Indian, Deccan plateau and rainshadow zone of Western
Ghats.

17. Solution to Improve Efficiency and Productivity of Dryland Agriculture
• Water-harvesting: It means capturing rain where it falls or capturing
the runoff in your own village or town and taking measures to keep
that water clean by not allowing polluting activities to take place in
the catchment.
• Capturing runoff from rooftops
• Capturing runoff from local catchments
• Capturing seasonal floodwaters from local streams
• Conserving water through watershed management
• Agronomical practices on scientific basis e.g. Crop rotation,
intercropping etc
• Soil preparation: No soil is ideal hence it necessitates the preparation
of soil before and after the cultivation. Soil fertility may be lost due to
continuous farming; for the replenishment of soil contents, it is
prepared prior to sowing of seeds. In agriculture, ploughing, levelling,
and manuring are the three steps of soil preparation.

18. • Organic farming: Organic farming is a system that avoids or excludes use of
synthetic inputs like pesticides, fertilizers, hormones, etc. and relying on
techniques like crop rotation, organic wastes, farm manure, rock additives and
crop residues for plant protection and nutrient utilization.
• Watershed management: It involves the management of land surface and
vegetation so as to conserve the soil and water for immediate and long-term
benefits to the farmers, community, and society as a whole. The various
measures adopted under soil and water harvesting is:
• Vegetative barriers
• Building of contour bunds along contours for erosion
• Furrow/Ridges and Furrow ridge method of cultivation across the slope.
• Irrigation water management through drip and sprinkler methods.
• Planting of horticultural contour species on bunds.
• Ecological conservation techniques in farming: Ecological farming includes all
methods, including organic, which regenerate ecosystem services like: prevention
of soil erosion, water infiltration and retention, carbon sequestration in the form
of humus, and increased biodiversity. Many techniques are used including no-till,
multispecies cover crops, strip cropping, terrace cultivation, shelterbelts, pasture
cropping, etc.
• Use of HYV varieties of crops (drought resistance crops).

21. Dry land technology
• Land configuration
• Selection of varieties
• Integrated seed treatment
• Direct seeding of rice
• Raised bed maize machine sowing
• Raised bed maize + blackgram
machine sowing
• Raised bed blackgram machine sowing
• Raised bed groundnut drill seeding
• Supplementary irrigation with
sprinkler
• DSR cultivation from farm pond
seepage water
• Green manure incorporation
• Nutrient management
• PPFM foliar spray
• Biochar
• Farm pond
• Alternate land use planning
• Coir pith compost application
• Pest management

22. Fertilizer Microdosing
• Appropriate technologies for greater productivity on dryland
farms.
• The application of small, affordable quantities of inorganic
fertilizer with the seed at planting time, or as a top dressing to
enhance fertilizer efficiency compared to spreading fertilizer over
the field.
• This is a solution to poor farming techniques, nutrient deficiency
and lack of water particularly in Niger and Zimbabwe where
there are low crop yields, soil nutrient depletion, low
productivity and farmers have little ability to invest in fertilizer

23. Lysimeter facility at ICRISAT - crop physiology research for
better adaption to dryland stresses.

26. Finally….
• If we keep producing and consuming as usual, we will eat into the
planet’s capacity to sustain life until there is nothing left but
scraps. We all need to make better choices about what we eat and
what we wear to help protect and restore the land.
• With urbanization, many of us have become distant from the land.
"Food Feed Fiber" are essential to our daily life, and most of them are
originated from the ground. However, in this digital world, everything
mentioned above can easily buy in stores, and we, human mostly
disregard the benefits given by trees and nature. With increasing
Desertification and Drought, we hope to make people better
understand that the real links between what they buy and the
damage done to the earth.

27. References
• Vijayan, Roshni. "Dryland agriculture in India–problems and solutions." Asian J. Environ. Sci 11, no. 2
(2016): 171-177.
• Singh, Harish P., Kapil D. Sharma, Gangireddy Subba Reddy, and Kishori L. Sharma. "Dryland agriculture in
India." Challenges and strategies of dryland agriculture 32 (2004): 67-92.
• https://www.icrisat.org/tag/dryland-agriculture/
• https://www.un.org/en/observances/desertification-day

28. Thank you