Question

Discuss the ways in which agricultural output can be increased. What were the most common routes to growth of output in the past? What is the most applicable route in the present?

Answer 1

1. Below are the ways in which agricultural output can be increased:

Transport- To facilitate the farmers to produce new farm inputs and enable them to sell their product in markets, villages should be linked with mandies. It would help to raise their income which in turn stimulates the farmer’s interest to adopt better farm technology with sufficient income.

Irrigation Facilities:- Crop productivity depends not only on the quality of input but also on the irrigation facilities. Therefore, canals, tube wells should be constructed to provide better irrigation facilities for the security of crops.

Institutional Credit: To save the farmers from the clutches of moneylenders, adequate credit facilities should be made available at reasonable cheap rates in rural areas. The land mortgage banks and co-operative credit societies should be strengthened to provide loans to the cultivators.

Proper Marketing Facilities: Marketing infrastructure should be widened and strengthened to help the farmers to sell their products at better prices.

Consolidation of Holdings: In various states consolidation of holdings is not satisfactory. Therefore, efforts should be made towards completing the consolidation work in the specific period of time.

Agricultural Education: In a bid to guide and advise the farmers regarding the adoption of new technology arrangements should be made for agricultural education and extension services.

2. The most common routes to growth of output in the past were:

Plant Early, Plant Effectively.

Practice Seasonal Soil Rotation

Know The Yield Potential

Ensure Proper Water Drainage

Weed Early and Often and Testing the seed quality

Green Revolution

3. The  most applicable route for increasing the agricultural output in the present are:

Agriculture is undergoing a fourth revolution triggered by the exponentially increasing use of information and communication technology (ICT) in agriculture.

Autonomous, robotic vehicles have been developed for farming purposes, such as mechanical weeding, application of fertilizer, or harvesting of fruits. The development of unmanned aerial vehicles with autonomous flight control , together with the development of lightweight and powerful hyperspectral snapshot cameras that can be used to calculate biomass development and fertilization status of crops, opens the field for sophisticated farm management advice. Moreover, decision-tree models are available now that allow farmers to differentiate between plant diseases based on optical information. Virtual fence technologies allow cattle herd management based on remote-sensing signals and sensors or actuators attached to the livestock.

Taken together, these technical improvements constitute a technical revolution that will generate disruptive changes in agricultural practices. This trend holds for farming not only in developed countries but also in developing countries, where deployments in ICT (e.g., use of mobile phones, access to the Internet) are being adopted at a rapid pace and could become the game-changers in the future