Concept of Agriculture Integrated Farming System

 

                                Integrated Farming Systems (IFS) is a system which focuses on increasing farm productivity by increasing diversification, resource integration and creating market linkages. Nurturing biodiversity on the farm. Back in the 60s, world was going through severe food crises. As we could no longer expand our production areas, the challenge was to increase the productivity to feed the fast growing population. The traditional agricultural systems were failing us. We needed to modernize our agriculture and we needed new technologies – as we were told. Green Revolution ushered in with the promise of giving us more food with promises of hiking up the productivity. It did so. World’s food stores swelled over the next few decades. Whether that food reached our starved and half starved countrymen, is a different story.

Now, the modern technologies too seem to be failing us. Our rich agricultural crop diversity is wiped off, thanks to the handful of high yielding and improved crop varieties that now sway in our farmlands. Those who are left are threatened by GM crops. Rampant use of chemical fertilizers has led to the death of soil. Thanks to the indiscriminate and erratic use of chemical pesticides – our food and ecosystem is poisoned. The small and marginal farmers, the majority of the third world’s population, who are ploughing their ancestral land, often own less than an hectare of land. This includes the field and the homestead.

Integrated Farming System (IFS) tries to look deeper into this crisis, particularly of the small family farms falling in between the modern and primitive production systems. Integrated farming is a system which tries to imitate the nature’s principle, where not only crops but, varied types of plants, animals, birds, fish and other aquatic flora and fauna are utilized for production. These are combined in such a way and proportion that each element helps the other; the waste of one is recycled as resource for the other.

The basic principle is to enhance the ecological diversity – by choosing the appropriate cropping methodology with mixed cropping, crop rotation, crop combination and inter cropping so that there is less competition for water, nutrition and space and adopting eco-friendly practices; by following Multistory arrangement so that the total available area is effectively used and there is a high level of interaction among biotic and abiotic components; by integrating subsystems by which the various components interact positively, so that the whole farm productivity is increased. IFS is a labor intensive system, thereby engaging the farmer family productively on their own farms, throughout the year. IFS will lead to collective efforts among the farmers like collective purchase of inputs and collective marketing of produce, thus reducing their costs of production.