Abstract
The north eastern region (NER) of India (26.3 M ha geographical area) comprises seven hill states (Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Tripura) and parts of hilly region of Assam popularly referred as North Eastern Himalayan Region of India (18.37 M ha) and the pain and valleys of Assam (7.84 M ha). The hill and mountain ecosystems of the region need to be protected, rehabilitated, and developed with much more emphasis than any other ecosystems as the health of the hill will decide the health of the plains. More than 95% of the soils of the NER are acidic due to leaching of basic cations because of heavy rainfall. Intensive natural resource mining and continuous degradation of natural resources (soil, water, vegetation) under conventional agriculture practices are a threat to sustain farm productivity and food security for posterity. It is observed that improved conservation effective techniques like minimum and/or no till practices, crop diversification, cover crops, and in situ moisture conservation practices using locally available biomass and substitution of bulky organic nutrient sources by at least 30–40% of the crop residues or weed biomass can address land degradation issues and provide solution for sustainable soil health management to the resource-poor farmers of the region. Similarly, inclusion of short-duration crops in cereal-based cropping system and legume co-culture is found to be potential resource conservation options to sustain the soil health and enhance cropping intensity in NER. The conservation agriculture (CA) practices developed elsewhere in the world and India like those in Indo-Gangetic Plains may need to be refined for their applicability to the hill and mountain ecosystem of NER. For the promotion of CA practices across diverse agro-ecologies of eastern Himalayas, appropriate policy and institutional measures and technology support would be a prerequisite.
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Yadav, G.S., Babu, S., Layek, J., Singh, R., Das, R., Das, A. (2021). Conservation Agriculture in the North Eastern Himalayan Eco-Region of India. In: Jayaraman, S., Dalal, R.C., Patra, A.K., Chaudhari, S.K. (eds) Conservation Agriculture: A Sustainable Approach for Soil Health and Food Security . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0827-8_10
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