“I lost a lot of money growing groundnuts through chemical farming methods,” says Ramesh, who goes by the first letter of his father’s name followed by his first name, as is common in many parts of southern India. The chemicals were expensive and his yields low.
Then in 2017, he dropped the chemicals. “Ever since I took up regenerative agricultural practices like agroforestry and natural farming, both my yield and income have increased,” he says.
Agroforestry involves planting woody perennials (trees, shrubs, palms, bamboos, etc.) alongside agricultural crops (SN: 7/3/21 & 7/17/21, p. 30). One natural farming method calls for replacing all chemical fertilizers and pesticides with organic matter such as cow dung, cow urine and jaggery, a type of solid dark sugar made from sugarcane, to boost soil nutrient levels. Ramesh also expanded his crops, originally groundnuts and some tomatoes, by adding papaya, millets, okra, eggplant (called brinjal locally) and other crops.
With help from the nonprofit Accion Fraterna Ecology Centre in Anantapur, which works with farmers who want to try sustainable farming, Ramesh increased his profits enough to buy more land, expanding his parcel to about four hectares. Like the thousands of other farmers practicing regenerative farming across India, Ramesh has managed to nourish his depleted soil, while his new trees help keep carbon out of the atmosphere, thus playing a small but important role in reducing India’s carbon footprint. Recent studies have shown that the carbon sequestration potential of agroforestry is as much as 34 percent higher than standard forms of agriculture.
In western India, more than 1,000 kilometers from Anantapur, in Dhundi village in Gujarat, 36-year-old Pravinbhai Parmar is using his rice farm for climate change mitigation. By installing solar panels, he no longer uses diesel to power his groundwater pumps. And he has an incentive to pump only the water he needs because he can sell the electricity he doesn’t use.
If all farmers like Parmar shifted to solar, India’s carbon emissions, which are 2.88 billion metric tons per year, could drop by between 45 million and 62 million tons annually, according to a 2020 report in Carbon Management. So far, the country has about 250,000 solar irrigation pumps out of an estimated 20 million to 25 million total groundwater pumps.
For a nation that has to provide for what will soon be the world’s largest population, growing food while trying to bring down already high greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural practices is difficult. Today, agriculture and livestock account for 14 percent of India’s gross national greenhouse gas emissions. Adding in the electricity used by the agriculture sector brings this figure up to 22 percent.
Ramesh and Parmar are part of a small but growing group of farmers getting assistance from government and nongovernmental programs to change how they farm. There’s still a ways to go to reach the estimated 146 million others who cultivate 160 million hectares of arable land in India. But these farmers’ success stories are testimony that one of India’s largest emitting sectors can change. India’s farmers are already deeply feeling the effects of climate change, coping with dry spells, erratic rainfall and increasingly frequent heat waves and tropical cyclones. “When we talk about climate-smart agriculture, we are largely talking about how it has reduced emissions,” says Indu Murthy, sector head for climate, environment and sustainability at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, a think tank in Bengaluru. But such a system should also help farmers “cope with unexpected changes and weather patterns,” she says.
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