Resource Conservation Technologies (RCTs) in rice-wheat production: An Overview

Agricultural sciences

Rice-wheat cropping system is the pre-dominant cropping system in India, which is labor-intensive, water-intensive, capital-intensive, and energy-intensive and it has become less profitable as these resources have become scarcer. This could be exacerbated by deterioration of soil structure, declining underground water, and lower land and water productivity, all of which pose a threat to the country's long-term viability. Moreover, continuous use of traditional agricultural practices such as tillage and crop residue burning has depleted the soil resource base and exacerbated soil depletion, resulting in a reduction in crop production. Furthermore, rising fuel, fertilizer, and other input costs necessitate efficient resource management in agriculture. This collected review literature focuses on various resource saving yet efficient technologies that can be adopted in rice-wheat system for improving and sustaining higher yields. However, adoption of conservation tillage practices can significantly improve the systems productivity by improving SOC pools and it help directly in building–up of soil organic carbon, labile organic carbon fractions and improve the fertility status of soil and production sustainability in RW system.

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