Читать книгу Sustainable Agriculture Systems and Technologies - Группа авторов - Страница 34

India is a highly diversified country in terms of climatic conditions, soil types, topography, and other agro climatic conditions. Therefore, the ICAR has divided the whole country into 15 agroclimatic zones. This help for wider cultivation of number of crops in the country. India is also one of the mega biodiverse countries and many of the crops originated in India. Traditionally, the farmers were practicing a diversified cropping system by inclusion of many crops during different crop season. But over the period, after green revolution and increasing government efforts and food demand, lot of emphasis has been paid only to cereal‐based system. This resulted in growing of one or two crops only.

 Diverse agro‐climatic conditions

 Diverse weather within a year

 Huge market

 Great potential for processing and value addition

 Large number of crops, including underutilized

Figure 2.3 indicated that diverse bioclimatic zones of India along with different agroclimate favors for promotion of crop diversification. For achieving a very useful diversification plan, there is a need to develop intensive cropping systems with diverse crops. Furthermore, these agro ecological regional classifications indicate very systematically the existence of diverse soil, climatic, and growing conditions and based on these diverse conditions, across the country the suitable crop diversification plans have been developed by various experts. There is a need to popularize these time‐tested crop diversification plans vigorously in the country at farmers’ fields to get all the benefits to the small and marginal farmers in particular.