Restructuring the agricultural supply chain

Abstract

Agriculture is not very profitable for the farmers with increased costs of production. Conventional agricultural practices depend on expensive modern equipment and machineries and costlier inputs such as fertilisers, chemicals, pesticides, fuel and hybrid seeds. The agricultural supply chain is relooked at and its architecture is restructured by changing the flow. After restructuring, the agricultural supply chain starts from the farmer who can self sustain by adapting to alternative or low input sustainable farming methods such as zero budget natural farming, bio-dynamic farming, natural farming, effective micro-organisms which are discussed briefly. Various hypotheses are proposed related to problems of increased physical capital investments by farmers in the agricultural supply chain, how alternative sustainable farming methods can possibly be used to reduce the physical capital investments and the barriers for farmers in adopting the alternative sustainable farming methods.