Ramesh Hanumaiya digs a couple of inches into his subject together with his hand and examines the soil. There is motion within the thick, brown earth: Tiny earthworms being disturbed from their homestead.

A handful of filth full of earthworms may not look like a lot, however it’s the results of seven years’ work. “This soil used to be as hard as a brick,” mentioned 37-year-old Ramesh. “It’s now like a sponge. The soil is rich with the nutrients and life that’s needed for my crops to grow on time and in a healthy way.”

Like Ramesh 1000’s of different farmers in Anantapur, a district within the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, have taken to what’s often known as regenerative agricultural practices. Techniques like utilizing pure fertilizers and planting crops alongside timber and different crops have been profitable at combating desertification, the method of once-fertile floor turning into mud. Climate change is exacerbating the lack of arable land as temperatures rise and rainfall turns into extra irregular.

Described by the United Nations’ desertification company as one of many best threats to human society, it’s estimated that over 40% of the world’s land is already degraded. Around 1.9 billion hectares of land, greater than twice the dimensions of the United States, and roughly 1.5 billion folks globally are affected indirectly by desertification, in keeping with U.N. estimates.

“It was always a dry region but we knew when it will rain and people used to farm accordingly,” mentioned 69-year-old Malla Reddy, who runs a non-profit that encourages pure farming practices within the area. “Now what’s happening is that the rainfall can happen at any season, farmers are unable to predict this and many a time lose their crops.”

Hotter temperatures additionally imply water is evaporating faster, leaving much less within the floor for thirsty crops.

Reddy’s non-profit works with over 60,000 farmers throughout 300,000 acres of land within the district, supporting particular person farmers to revive unproductive land throughout the whole area.

Most Indian farmers depend on rainfed agriculture, with about 70 million hectares — about half of all farmed land in India — depending on downpours. These lands are additionally those most topic to poor agricultural strategies, similar to extreme use of chemical fertilizers, over tilling and monocropping, the apply of planting only a single crop every year, consultants say.

Reddy, the director of Accion Fraterna Ecology Centre, and the farmers his group helps use strategies often known as pure farming and agroforestry to keep away from spoiling the land. Natural farming replaces all chemical fertilizers and pesticides with natural matter similar to cow dung, cow urine and jaggery, a sort of strong darkish sugar created from sugarcane, to spice up soil nutrient ranges. Agroforestry entails planting woody perennials, timber, shrubs and palms alongside agricultural crops.

And whereas most different farmers within the area both develop groundnuts or paddy utilizing chemical fertilizers, pure farmers develop quite a lot of crops. Multi-cropping ensures that soil vitamins are periodically restored, versus distinct seeding in harvesting seasons, Reddy mentioned.

For different farmers within the space, a lot of the land is changing into unusable for cultivation due to the in depth use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and weedicides.

“Every week there are many trucks with speakers cruising through our villages, asking farmers to buy this pesticide or that weedicide. Their marketing is incredible and farmers get fooled,” says E.B. Manohar, a 26-year-old pure farmer within the village of Khairevu, additionally in Anantapur district.

Manohar give up his job as a mechanical engineer in Bengaluru, generally known as “India’s Silicon Valley,” to take up pure farming in his house city. On his farm he grows tomatoes, chilies and cabbage, amongst different crops and greens.

“I have also started supplying natural fertilizer and weedicide to other farmers in my village,” Manohar mentioned. “Since they have seen that my investment is low and my returns are good, more and more people are getting interested in trying this out.”

But for efforts like Manohar’s and Reddy’s to make a nationwide affect, consultants say these initiatives have to be rolled out on a wider scale.

“Desertification is among the biggest challenges facing India,” mentioned N.H. Ravindranath, who helped writer a number of U.N. local weather studies and has researched desertification within the nation for the final twenty years. He mentioned that though the land restoration work in Anantapur is commendable, scaling up is the actual problem.

“We need serious financing for climate adaptation and government policies that encourage restoration. These are the only things that will make this impact on scale,” he added. Money for adapting to harsher climate situations has lengthy been mentioned at U.N. local weather conferences like COP27, as the results of local weather change make it more durable for a lot of to maintain their livelihoods. Some funding for susceptible nations has been promised however a lot of it hasn’t been fulfilled.

Around 70% of all land on the earth is already transformed by people from its pure state for meals manufacturing and different functions and round one in 5 of these transformed hectares are already degraded, mentioned Barron Joseph Orr, lead scientist at United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

“We’ve lost productivity in those lands, so we’re undercutting what we’ve converted. So we’ve got a big problem here,” Orr mentioned. “We need to incentivize sustainable land management for small farmers and herders. In our conventional form of farming, we’re dependent on chemical fertilizers, which works, but it basically short circuits the natural processes in the soil” which stops it from regenerating, making it unusable in the long term.

Orr added that land restoration can stop planet-warming gases from escaping degraded floor and going into the environment.

Back in Anantapur, Ajantha Reddy, a 28-year-old pure farmer tends to his candy lime crops. Sweet limes require farmers to attend for a few years earlier than they’ll see any return on their labor and funding. Reddy is just not frightened, although.

“The trees have grown in 17 months as much as I would have expected them to grow in four years,” he mentioned as he trimmed his fruit crops. Reddy give up his job as a software program engineer in Bengaluru in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and returned to his village in Anantapur to farm.

For Reddy, the satisfaction of seeing his crops and his house city thrive are a sufficiently big incentive to proceed pure farming practices for the foreseeable future.

“I have no intention of going back to Bangalore. When I came home during the pandemic, I thought, ‘why should I go and work for someone else? I have land to cultivate and I could give livelihood to a few people,’” he mentioned. “That thought made up my mind.”

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Follow Sibi Arasu on Twitter at @sibi123

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