organic farming

Hilly areas with their varying heights and land categories are known for their valuable bio-diversity which should be protected. The vast Himalayan ranges including  hills and valleys, plains and peaks in particular are all the more important in this context. While the tendency to introduce genetic uniformity of monocultures was unfortunate everywhere, it was all the more harmful in the[Read More...]

Seed is the base of all life. Recognizing this obvious fact, farmers for well over a hundred generations and for several thousand years cared for seeds, respected seeds, and helped to promote a great diversity of seeds. Hence they had different seeds for different needs, for different weather conditions, for different kinds of land and soil. Diverse varieties of seeds[Read More...]

Recently Sant Seechewal, saint and award winning eco-activist of Punjab, visited protesting farmers at Delhi border with the  precious gift of a truckload of healthy food. However the message he brought him was even more precious—he called upon them to shift to natural farming and mutually  cooperative farming in order to find more reliable and sustainable solutions to their problems.[Read More...]

While the social benefits of ecologically protective, organic and/or natural farming are so obvious, it is sometimes said that in economic terms this may not be so beneficial for farmers and this thinking becomes a big hurdle in the spread of ecologically protective farming. However the advocates of ecologically protective farming and low external input farming give several important reasons[Read More...]

Today is the last day of the dreadful year that 2020 was – not only because of the pandemic but it has been a year full of the most vicious attacks on dissent and protests. It has also seen wanton arrests of those who raised their voices against the myriad injustices of this regime. The … Continue reading Farming the Future, Farming As Future →

The farmers’ movement in India has a historically very important role in protecting the small ( and medium ) farmer base of agriculture in the country. In recent times the movement has done well to oppose the corporatization trends as these ultimately present a threat to small farmers, as has been evident from the historical experience of many countries. This[Read More...]

There is worldwide realization that food system has been  becoming less safe and healthy. This is to a large extent because of the use of excessive  chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Some of the inputs used in fact have been found to be so poisonous and harmful that it is a very sad surprise how their use in food and[Read More...]

by Salvatore Ceccarelli Science has recently begun associating the decline of biodiversity with the increase of inflammatory diseases. These range from inflammatory bowel disease, to ulcerative colitis, to cardiovascular disorders, to various liver diseases and ...

Bayer and Monsanto have a long history of collusion to poison the ecosystem for profit. The Trump administration should veto their merger not just to protect competitors but to ensure human and planetary survival. Two new studies from Europe have found that the number of farm birds in France has crashed by a third in […]

It is possible to feed more than 9 billion people with organic production methods with a small increase in the required crop acreage and with decreased greenhouse gas emission. But this assumes considerable reduction in food wastage and in the quantities of feed grown to animals. That is the conclusion in the paper Strategies for feeding the world more sustainably with[Read More...]