Not so much introduce, but rather, why was organic farming supplanted by 'industrial based' farming, which is an interesting and large question (everywhere)! Mainly as RoI was bigger, but many factors.

More inputs and less output is the main limitation of organic farming. We can not feed our population by organic farming.

Dear Ms Kaur,

Your concern is highly appreciated. Punjab has prospects and strengths because of the advantages in terms of communication, established market, technical support and field infrastructures and efficient agriculture production system. People are putting efforts for the same and you might be inspired going through the links below:

http://umendradutt.blogspot.in/2010/03/ecological-farming-in-punjab-issues.html

http://umendradutt.blogspot.in/2011/10/green-agenda-for-sustainable-punjab.html

http://ofai.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Organic-Farmers-and-Farms-of-Punjab.pdf

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/agri-business/punjabto-set-up-organic-farming-board-badal/article6959169.ece

It's started, and it'd grow with time.

Thanku Dr Sahib. If we think more inputs less output is the main limitation of organic farming. We can not feed our population by organic farming. Dr sahib please think about major issue more people are suffering with disease cause by more use of pesticides and insecticide and fertilizers.  

 Thanku Dr Mark perry.

I compliment Dr.Borah for providing some good information on Punjab agriculture and the initiatives to correct the practices of agriculture.The health related problems may be mainly due to excess use of pesticides. Punjab farmers need to use both water and fertilizers with focus on soil health and environment, water quality,economy and efficiency  in use of the costly inputs.Industrial and urban activities also lead to heavy metal load in soils and consequently their movement to water and human beings.Our agricultural scientists and extension agencies need to educate farmers in good  agricultural practices.

In my opinion the whole discussion of organic or industrial farming is rather a temporary fashion thing than deep science.

As usual in science everything depends on the perspective. If you just take the amount of work as the one and only criteria for effective farming, you will get another result as if comparing all other dimensions like ecosystem health / services (e.g. flood protection, climate influence, dessertification) drought tolerance, soil fertility, carbondioxid, water etc. balances.

But complex thoughts are not popular, as well as complex context. So people favour easy solutions. It is more easy to throw just something on the field which someone recommend than thinking about why the field has a lack of this things? What does my (missing) action cause in a few years?

Asking questions is a good start.

I would hypothesize with sophisticated organic farming you can have the same yield per ha with more labor and more sophisticated labor but a less vulnerability crop for less predictable events like droughts, heavy rainfall, diseases etc. On the long run it will turn out to be the more sustainable method to work on causes rather than on symptoms.

Within the added work an combination is preferred.

Article Environmental, Energetic, and Economic Comparisons of Organi...

Dear Henrik,

First and foremost thank you for the citing of our analysis of a comparison of Organic and Conventional Farming Systems.

In our Rodale work, Farming Systems Trial,  we sought to prove what is possible in the major maize and soybean based crop system if only biological inputs were depended on. Maize and Soybean are cultivated in about 80 million hectares in North America.

The thought at the time was Organic systems for these field crops could not be done competitively.  Our results have disproved that null hypothesis energetically, economically and environmentally.

Our intention was to prove out the transformative and long term effect of using biological compared to chemical approaches.  The long term results show the soil improvement not only improves the competitive nature of the system overtime but also can contribute to mitigating our over enrichment of atmospheric Carbon and Nitrogen both by reduced fossil fuel input but more importantly through significant sequestration in soil C and N.

You are right if we had to intention other than our goal of improving the biological system results could be dramatically different. Indeed a consequence of our perspective and our initiative to follow through on a goal means a lot and short term experiment would give erroneous misleading results.  

In the Rodale Institute we are clear that our goal is the optimization of a system which was and is viewed as alternative and our intention was to see if lack of competitiveness in the short term is something that could be remedied by transformative biological process over long term.  This has been abundantly demonstrated in the more than 30 years of analysis.

This is showing us that we do not need just short term status determination but long term prospective and developmental initiative and insight.  In fact short term consideration is not a solution but part of our problem.

We can argue that short term emphasis is something that does not necessarily reflect the long term truth. This truth is that soil improvement has great potential to lift our results and biological inputs can over ride benefits of relying on synthetic chemical inputs.

In fact the academic system is a short term system for the vast majority of research which is strictly based on individual advancement through tenure.  In that way short term emphasis pays in a strictly selfish academic sense.

When need to work to develop longer term research without the heavy concentration and excessive specialization. 

Especially since much of our constraint is in the loss of farming system diversity and biological resource loss.  

Thanks again for your keen insight and initiative.

Paul Reed Hepperly

This is because of farmers not following recommendations. By sufficient research work, recommendations were given, but farmers uses high doses. Concentration, Time of application matters the post harvest residues on agricultural produce. Without use of chemicals we are not able to feed our populations, just use recommended doses of chemicals.

Dr. Vinayak i agree with you, but chemical fertilizers are more harmful for our health.  i think we are eating poisons through various chemicals in our diet.  

Ms .Sukhvir,based on your background and knowledge, can you say which fertilizers  or their constituents or contaminants are poisons?Have you come across any reports? My only concern is we can not equate fertilizers with pesticides.Among the fertilizers the phosphatic fertilizers like diammonium phosphate,monoammonium phosphate and triple super phosphate etc may contain some heavy metals like Lead (Pb),Cadmium (Cd),Nickle(Ni) Cobalt (Co) and Chromium (Cr).Continuous addition of such fertilizers for long time may increase their concentration in soils and so monitoring such heavy metals periodically in intensively cultivated soils is important from plant, animal and human health point of view.

It's true what Dr Rao sir has suggested. Few reports on nitrate pollution of groundwater sources in Punjab (high N-fertilizer consumption) and UP, Rajasthan are available. Similarly, P-fertilizer are reported potential source of heavy metal contamination in soil. In Punjab, several works on heavy metal contamination in soil due to use of sewage water/effluent (industrial pollution) for irrigation had been reported.

 Near to nature /biofarming or organic system is a cyclic system where resources are recycled and system have inherent capacity of restoration and to great extent resilience and simultaneously all the components( flora and fauna) are complimentary . In this case once the system developed ( may take 3-6 years)there is least requirement of external inputs.

BUT in chemical farming   by keeping NATURE aside, all the managment is done with external inputs, least recycling, no complimentary relation and this is further agravated by mono-culture of rice -wheat for years. 

Here farmer has no fault because in this system fertiliser and pesitcides requirement increase year after year to get same level of production- a true vicious cycle that ends with stop farming/barren land.

Most of the policies for promotion of organic framing  starts with rules of regulations of CERTIFIED ORGANIC and that not possible with this type of intensive chemical farming areas , YES if farmers are motivated for gradual shift from chemical to organic i.e. decreasing chemical input and increasing organic inputs in 3-6 years there will be certainly organic farming adopted by most of the farmers and this  has been shown by many farmers in Punjab and Haryana . I also suggested this strategy in one of my paper   on PROGRAMMING FOR ORGANIC AGRUCLTURE-------" available in my publication ( research gate). 

Most of the time Govt. gives contract of promotion of orgnaic farming to some certifying agency/ organic promoter who start with strict rules and regulation of organic and ends up with no organic farming

Lastly with my experience of more than a decade- the yield decrease in organic farming if  ABRUPT SHIFT from chemical to organic  but no yield reduction rather total higher yield of all componeents after 4-6 years provided,  proper management