Panchagavya: Boon to Organic Farming

Agriculture in India has a long history which dates back to the Neolithic age of 7500-6500 BC.  In those days farming system adopted aimed at maintaining the livelihood of farmers on a sustainable basis along with livestock with minimum damage to the environment.  In the past decades, agricultural development focused on short-term productivity based on external inputs resulted in damage to the environmental resources and indigenous knowledge and hence, the agriculture can hardly be perceived as sustainable.  During the present scenario all over the world, efforts are being made to work towards ecologically friendly agriculture.  One such option is organic farming as it is a holistic approach which takes care of all the components of the system.  It is nature based, environment friendly and sustainable ensuring not only the requirement of the present but also ensures the conservation of resources for future.  Organic farming has developed very rapidly in recent years.  Indian agricultural has a better chance to convert itself as organic agriculture because, the per capita and per ha consumption of chemical fertilizer and pesticides in the country is much lower than the global standards.  In olden days cattle based agriculture was widely practices.  Cow is greatly respected, worshipped. The Cow is an inseparable part of the farming community.  We are directly benefited from cow in terms of milk production, dung and urine production as well as milk products like curd (sour milk), butter and ghee, Panchagavya, a mixture of five cow products namely, dung, urine, milk, curd and ghee is used in human medicine, to activate soil and to protect plants from disease.  The very purpose of writing this manuscript on ‘panchagavya’ is to document the beneficial effects of panchagavya in crop production and spreading the experiences we have gained in scientific validation of the beneficial effects of panchagavya of food crops.  There are 11 chapters in this book covering subjects like Heritage of Indian agriculture, Vrkshayurvedic farming, Organic farming, Cow-the sacred animal and Panchagavya and the like.  This book will  meet the requirements of organic farmers, promoters, NGOs, scientists, students and people involved in organic farming.