Environment, Agroforestry and Livestock Management

By the turn of the twenty-first century, there lies a possible threat due to atmospheric pollution, change in global climate, depletion of aquifers, per capita shrinking of croplands, collapsing ecosystems. For an evergreen agriculture, agroforestry and livestock production through scientific management possibly deserves a trial with hitherto adopted policy, skewed for crop production. These systems have more growth potential which became evident during last decade, when crop production was stagnant and these sectors grew around four per cent per annum. Development of a comprehensive management of tree fodders, forages, grazing lands and livestock, is called upon to expand and sustain employment and strengthen livelihood security, particularly in drought prone areas. The rangelands, are in dwindling state and need scientific inputs for their revegitation involving tree, grass and legume components. Further, there is wide gap between demand and supply of food, fuel wood, fodder, fibre and medicine, etc. Since the gargantuan relevance of these issues it was thought by many contributions of this volume that recent developments in environment, agroforestry and livestock production may be dealt together as a Felicitation volume in the honour of a senior colleague, Dr. Prem Shanker Pathak, who devoted his career researching on these lines. In this book 31 chapters covering wider topics in the field of environment, agroforestry and livestock management have been included. Subjects such as changing concepts in ecology, environmental sciences and grassland ecology; current trends and emerging scenario in Indian agriculture; agro-biodiversity and its conservation; silvi-pastoral research and management; water issues; agroforestry for different regions having specific goals; role of trees in carbon sequestration and soil amelioration have been incorporated under different chapters contributed by subject specialists. Under the sub-theme livestock, various aspects such as livestock and agroforestry interactions; reproduction disorders; methane emission and environment and other management issues have been highlighted. To make the document policy oriented aspects on intellectual property rights in relation to forage and livestock feeding; role of biotechnology in livestock and crop production and climate change and its consequences for crop production have been discussed.