Recent Trends and Advancements in Agricultural Research: An Overview

Abstract

Do you know the most precious thing happening in Indian Agriculture? Few keywords such as food, organic farming, climate change and improved farming techniques may strike to your mind. But the recent improvements in agriculture are way more advanced. These advancements along with the increase in urbanization are major drivers for the evolution of agricultural research. Recent trends in the area of Agricultural Research comprise of Eco-Agro-tourism, Big Data Analytics, Climate Smart Agriculture, Advanced Marketing Linkages, Integrated Farming System, etc. These trends are important not only from the research context but also from the policy point of view towards ambitious goal of doubling farmers’ income by 2022. In today’s’ era technology plays a very important role in encouraging farmers to take up entrepreneurial ventures and agro-based industries. Recent research has also spoken about combining Agriculture technology with the Information technology for improving the agricultural output. Traditional farming approach need to be replaced with the modern farming approaches like Integrated Farming System, Vertical Farming, Forward and Backward integration, etc. With the increase in population and limited resource availability, research related to Urban Agriculture is being emphasized which encourages the urban population to go for organic cultivation for healthy and safe produce. With the increase in per capita income, consumers are willing to spend more on quality products which is impacting backward linkages towards farmers to adopt good practices at production level. For mitigating the environmental challenges, research is focusing on Climate Smart Agricultural Techniques like DSR (Direct Seeded Rice) which reduces the water usage by about 50 to 60 percent and methane gas emission to a large extent ultimately helping the farmers to earn more carbon credits. In nutshell, it can be stated that along with coping up the major challenges such as climate change, boosting farmers’ income and feeding the billions, above stated trends in agricultural research are seen as ray of hope for sustaining Indian agriculture.