Insights on soil biological properties and crop yields under natural farming in western Himalaya

Abstract

Sustainability of agricultural production systems is a major concern in context to present environmental conditions. Natural farming (NF) is being promoted as low-cost environment friendly option. A study was carried out to investigate the effects of NF vis-a-vis organic farming (OF) and conventional farming (CF) systems on soil microbial population, enzymatic activity, and microarthropod population under tomato crop in the mid-hill zone of Himachal Pradesh, India. The results showed that bacterial population under NF increased by 42.8% and 24% in comparison to CF and OF, respectively. Similarly, the population of soil fungi and actinomycetes under NF increased by 80.5 and 67.7% over CF, and by 47.9 and 39.6% over OF, respectively. The soil dehydrogenase activity under NF (22.5µg TPF/g soil/h) was 150.6% higher than CF and 85.2% higher than OF. Similar trend was found for phosphatase and urease activity. Soil micro arthropod population after two years of experiment was also highest under NF followed by OF and CF. The system yield was statistically at par to each other, among different farming systems. All the soil biological parameters were significantly correlated with each other (P<0.001, N=42). However, the correlation of these parameters was not significant for crop yield.