Climate smart extension for soil and water conservation by KvK Nizamabad

Soil degradation has become a serious problem in both rainfed and irrigated areas of India. In India, 147 million hectares of land suffer from various kinds of degradation. Widespread land degradation caused by inappropriate agricultural practices has a direct and adverse impact on the environment, food, and livelihood security of farmers. For ensuring food and nutritional security on one hand conserving natural resources and ensuring environmental security in the other hand, there is an urgent need to employ and adopt conservation effective best practices in various aspects of agriculture. Adverse weather conditions impacting water and soil ecosystem resulting in farmers distress has become a major challenge in Nizamabad district. Therefore, an attempt has been made to help farmers to overcome the challenge disseminating climate resilient technologies with climate smart extension. This paper describes a few locations of speci ic technologies and practices demonstrated by Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Nizamabad, Telangana state under a technology demonstration component in a farmer’s ield for a climate-smart farming in rice, maize, and turmeric as major crops in the district to withstand the adverse climatic shocks. Conducting demonstrations on Aerobic rice and Organizing ield days and exposure visits on farmer’s own innovation with three different seed rates viz, 12,15 and 18 kgs per acre in aerobic rice and realization of good crop performance in 18 kgs per acre helped to change the perception of other farmers to adopt the technology. The on-farm testings on raised bed planting in maize, turmeric, and cluster front line demonstration on broad bed furrow planting in soybean saved the crops from failure with good yields in comparison to the latbed method of sowings while conserving soil and water during excess rainfall events, water logging, and prolonged dry spell conditions.