Sandeep Sunar / Organic agriculture is a unique production management system which promotes and enhances agro ecosystem health including biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity and is accomplished by using on-farm agronomic, biological and mechanical methods with exclusion of all off-farm inputs. The major principles of organic farming are: to work as much as possible within a closed system and draw upon local resources, to maintain long farm fertility of soils, to avoid all forms of pollution that may result from agricultural techniques, to produce foodstuffs of high nutrition in sufficient quantity, to reduce the use of fossil fuel at minimum, to enhance living standard of farmers and develop their potentialities as human being.

Looking at the present scenario of Nepal, many farmers in hill and mountains are following traditional farming practices which are similar to organic farming practices. However, many of them have no idea that their traditional practice is similar to organic farming. Due to lengthy certification process the product produced through organic means don’t get recognition as organic products. The traditional farming knowledge and skill in Nepal provides positive point for promoting the organic agriculture in Nepal. There is increasing trend of using inorganic chemicals, terminator seeds and adopting high input technologies because growing population is demanding cash income to run their household which has forced farmers to increase their agriculture production in turn they have started to adopt the modern farming technique. The deleterious effect of excessive and unbalanced use of pesticides and inorganic fertilizers on human health, animal health and environment has been reported time and again. In recent times various environmental friendly agriculture development efforts such as alternative agriculture, ecological farming, bio-dynamic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, natural farming, permaculture, sustainable agriculture with organic agriculture are in practice aiming to reduce the hazardous effect of the inorganic agriculture.

Improving agricultural productivity through increased use of chemical pesticide and high yielding varieties are the major intention of our government as it is a priority sector of current 10 years agriculture prospective plan (APP).All the national education, research extension and communication systems are concentrated in favor of high input agriculture system in Nepal.

Great possibility of organic farming exits in our country because many practices like crop rotation, mulching, drip irrigation are still organic in nature. Still chemical fertilizers and pesticides are out of reach in many places of our country. For example Jumla district has been declared as the organic district of Nepal for the first time because they have very  similar management practices to that of organic agriculture and due to poor transportation and availability of synthetic inputs use of such products are negligible their. Many places like jumla are still there in our country which have high no of farmers using traditional methods of agriculture . Such places and farmers have great scope in organic agriculture.

Although there is growing concern about the importance of organic farming in present context of our country but there have been limited researches on organic farming by government and non-governmental organizations. Most of the researches are concentrated only with soil fertility status and varietal trails. Therefore, it is suggested conduct research on scientific validation of traditional farming practices that could increase land productivity and resource sustainability, identify location specific technology for various regions, selection of suitable crops for organic farming and include it as one of the major components of farming system. Similarly production of large amount of organic food products by utilizing our traditional farming methods can be done in coming days. It not only helps to establish Nepalese organic products in world market but also provides great scope to our coming generation, consequently driving country towards peace and prosperity.

B.Sc.Ag 6^th Semester