What is CASI?
Conservation Agriculture is a farming system that combines three main principles- minimal soil movement, crop residue retention and crop diversification. And, sustainable intensification is an approach using innovations to build profitability on existing agrarian land with positive ecological and social effects.
Sustainable intensification takes into consideration the impact on overall farm productivity, profitability, stability, production and market risks, resilience, as well as the interests and capacity of individual farmers to adopt innovations. It is not limited to environmental concerns, but also includes social and economic criteria such as improving livelihoods, equity, and social capital.
Conservation Agriculture-based Sustainable Intensification (CASI) approach offers a chance to expand benefit and decrease inputs while keeping up yields even in the face of climate shocks, along these lines additionally strengthening the resilience of the farming system.
Benefits of CASI
In the Eastern Gangetic Plains (EGP) of India, Nepal and Bangladesh, Conservation Agriculture based Sustainable Intensification (CASI) has helped farmers adapt to climate risk and changing market and social conditions and reduce water and energy inputs for farm production on the other hand. CASI approach has therefore marked a higher increase in household income. Additionally, the CASI approach has helped create opportunities for the private sector to increase their businesses.
Since farmers in the EGP rely heavily on the small-scale private sector to access agricultural inputs and sell their outputs through local markets, it is the multi-stakeholder forums like farmers organizations and social networks that can help reach out to more smallholder farmers effectively.
Developing and strengthening of such existing multi-stakeholder forums, making extension service more farmer-oriented so that correct information about CASI and necessary services are easily accessible to the farmers at the right times, is the best method to promote CASI in the EGP.
Promoting CASI
Farmers today are exposed to vast knowledge due to advance technological communication networks, but the lack of correct CASI information and the absence of access to the right CASI machinery services are the major barriers that prevent scaling of CASI in the EGP. Along with suitable policies and institutional reforms, robust and wide-scale extension service is also required.
A complete cyber agricultural extension mechanism could prove to be an appropriate information delivery mechanism affordable to rural farmers to satisfy their thirst for information. Along with, appropriately trained extension service provider with thorough knowledge of CASI machinery, their operational and maintenance aspects, and the ability to customize information as per farmers’ need can help enhance CASI confidence among the farmers in the EGP.
… for more productive, profitable and resilient farming systems
The SRFSI project is a regional research for development collaboration of more than 30 partners, focused on the Eastern Gangetic Plains.
