Natural farming vs organic

The natural farming mission has the right inputs, but studies raise flags of scalability and viability

- SANJEEB MUKHERJEE

The Union Cabinet last month approved the National Mission on Natural Farming (NMNF) with an outlay of ₹2,481 crore by subsuming all previous efforts into this single programme, which aims to bring 10 million farmers into natural farming and targets to cover 0.75 million hectares of land.

In 2019-20, the Central government had started a programme on natural farming titled Bhartiya Prakratik Krishi Paddhati (Indian natural farming method). In 2022-23, a decision was made to build a 5 km natural farming corridor along the river Ganges. The two programmes covered 960,000 hectares nationwide. Both will now merge into the NMNF.

Reports say 0.7 million to nearly a million hectares of land has been brought under natural farming so far. This is a small fraction of the net sown area in the country of 141 million hectares.

Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu lead in land under natural farming.

Natural versus organic

The government says natural farming is a chemical-free farming system rooted in Indian tradition and supported by a modern understanding of ecology, resource recycling, and on-farm resource optimisation. The broad principle is that the soil itself contains all the nutrients essential for plant growth. The system is expected to cut dependency on purchased inputs and cut costs.

Natural farming has no external inputs. It uses indigenous seeds, on-farm produced microbial formulation for seed treatment (such as Bijamrita), on-farm made microbial inoculants (Jivamrita) for soil enrichment, cover crops, and mulching with green and dry organic matter for nutrient recycling for maximum beneficial microbial activity in soil.