Innovations in Utilization of Poor Quality Water for Sustainable Agricultural Production
To meet the requirements of food and other agricultural commodities for the burgeoning population is a big challenge for the agricultural community. With the increasing demand for good quality land and water for urbanization and development projects, agriculture will be pushed more and more to the marginal lands, and the use of poor quality waters for irrigation is inevitable. Groundwater aquifers in the most of arid and semiarid regions are saline, and therefore cultivation of conventional arable crops with saline irrigation has not been considered sustainable in these regions. However, concerted research efforts have shown that the degraded lands can be put to remunerative alternative uses (through agroforestry) including salt tolerant forest and fruit trees, crops, forage grasses, medicinal and aromatic and other high value crops, and adopting appropriate planting (e.g. subsurface planting) and other management techniques (furrow irrigation) Such uses have additional environmental benefits including carbon sequestration and biological reclamation. Agroforestry is not only a necessity for increasing tree cover and hence decreasing pressure on natural forests but also a most desired land use especially for reclaiming and rehabilitating the degraded lands, especially in arid and semiarid rainfed areas underlain with saline groundwater as source of irrigation. In developing countries like India, there seems to be little scope for bringing the fertile lands under forest cover. It may be emphasized that we can bring unproductive wastelands and waterlogged areas under forest cover and take agroforestry tree plantation on non forest community and farmlands utilizing poor quality water including drainage and wastewaters. The long term studies conducted show that salt affected and waterlogged areas and saline water (including seawater) can be utilized satisfactorily in raising forest and fruit tree species with improved techniques, forage grasses, conventional and nonconventional crops, oil yielding crops, aromatic and medicinal plants of high economic value, petro crops, and flower yielding plants.