Farmer’s Perception towards Adoption of Eco-Friendly Natural Farming System in Mandi District of Himachal Pradesh, India

Abstract

Over the past three decades, farming in India has become more and more unsustainable through the conventional farming system. The system had been set up for maximum output with little regard for the environment or the individual's existence. To overcome this, the best alternative is eco-friendly natural farming, which is economical and has been embraced by several Indian states. The objective of this research is to study the resource use efficiency, factors affecting adoption, and problems faced by farmers under the natural farming system in the Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh. Out of 12 districts, the Mandi district has been selected purposively due to a large number of farmers switching to the conventional farming system. A simple random sampling technique was used to select the farmers in the study area where a sample of 60 farmers was selected to analyse the Cobb-Douglas production function, Logit, Chi-square, and Garett ranking techniques were used. The study highlighted that out of the total cultivated area, the maximum area was under natural farming i.e., 64.83 per cent as compared to 35.17 per cent under a conventional farming system. The factor affecting the adoption of natural farming were chemical input cost, decreased pest attacks, health benefits, and quality yields with significant values of 0.006, 3.82, 4.16, and 3.94, respectively. It shows the rate of change in the adoption of natural farming systems with a 1 per cent change in the value of these factors. Besides this, there were some major constraints reported by farmers which hindered its widespread among farmers in the state.