Energetic of Crop Production Systems in Punjab

With the introduction of high yielding varieties, intensive cropping systems, increased use of fertilizers & chemicals and high levels of mechanization, the modern agriculture has become very much energy intensive. Keeping in view, the scarce and expensive energy resources, an attempt was made to clearly bring out the effect of farm size and cropping pattern on the energetic of crop production systems in the state of Punjab. The farmers were divided into four categories based on the size of land holdings viz., marginal farms (less than 1 ha), small farms (1 to <2 ha), semi-medium farms (2 to <4 ha) and medium farms (4 and more than 4 ha). The large farms (> = 10 ha) were merged with medium farms as their sample size was very small. Energy analysis was made for different crop rotations i.e. paddy-wheat, maize-wheat and cotton-wheat. Mobile power sources were observed to be more with medium farmers whereas small farmers were having mostly stationary power sources. As the farm size increased the use of commercial and non-renewable sources also increased. Energy-ratio was maximum for maize-wheat crop rotation (5.49) followed by cotton-wheat (5.30) and paddy-wheat (4.73). Paddy-wheat crop rotation consumed 93.9 per cent energy from commercial sources followed by cotton-wheat (92.4 per cent) and maize-wheat (83.7 per cent).