To help preserve the land commons and groundwater commons and break this cycle, the farmers should employ crop rotation techniques to maintain the topsoil’s nutrients and still be able to grow their commercial crops. Crop Rotation is the agricultural practice of planting different crops every season, where if one season cash crops (like soy and cotton) are grown then the other season other crops (that replenish the soil’s nutrients) are grown. With this alternating crop technique, the farmers do not need to use external sources for the soil’s fertility, since cover plants, like legumes and a patch of oats for “manure mitigation” (Klinkenborg, 2012), naturally replenish the soil’s viability when they are planted every other season (Sustainable …show more content…
This side of the solution space is more difficult, because it must not only pass the bureaucratic barriers in the government (ie. differences in political parties’ motivations) but also socio-cultural barriers in society (ie. farmers adamant on sticking to “traditional” agricultural practices for preserving “olden times” or their ancestral ways of farming). Anusuya Rangarajan’s manual on crop rotation has a section called Crop Rotation Effects on Soil Fertility and Plant Nutrition that explains the importance of the education of farmers on the first technical solution mentioned earlier, crop rotation. Through education on good farming techniques, farmers can make educated decisions on their crop rotation sequences and changes to their daily crop-tending practices to naturally maintain the soil’s fertility (Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education, 2012). The effectiveness of this philosophy of education on horticulture was tested in a study done in Telangana, India (Rangareddy district) for a duration of 3 years (2011-2014). In this study, some Indian women farmers were trained with a GAP (Good Agricultural Practices) program and the other Indian women farmers …show more content…
The educated women performed better in a majority of the mean scored categories (such as “Need for intercropping with leguminous crops”, “Regular addition of NPK fertilizers in soil”, and “Advantage of crop rotation”) than the uneducated women to a percentage difference on average of 40% (Guddanti, 2015). This study