Livestock and Agriculture

The great revolution in the history of agriculture was when domesticated animals were systematically integrated into crop rearing systems. This revolution took place thousands of years ago.

Even today, mixed crop and livestock farming systems is the system of livestock rearing practiced by most peasants and farmers across the country. These systems closely complement each other with animals providing energy for crops and fields in the form of draft animal power and manure and in turn getting their nutrition and energy from agricultural wastes and by products. Some of the best examples are the close link between migratory pastoral groups and settled farmers in Asia where pastoral groups exchange manure for agricultural produce. In the past this was a fairly closed system with almost no external inputs, no major investments and therefore hardly any produce going out of the system as it was almost entirely recycled within. Because of very little surplus marketable produce, cash income from this system was low and therefore this has been in general classified as non productive. However, what has not been taken into account is the effective recycling of bio mass which took place because of the close integration between livestock and crop rearing. Farmers who did not possess livestock were in fact the ones most likely to have problems as there was neither draft animal power available for critical farming activities such as ploughing nor was there animal manure to fertilize the fields.

With the coming of the green revolution and its package of practices; external chemicals, improved seeds, external energy (mechanization) inputs, irrigation and external capital, agricultural systems have changed. Simultaneously, they have also changed the role of livestock within agriculture and with respect to agriculture. In some cases livestock have been displaced such as draft animal power by machines and animal manure by chemical fertilizers. This has consequently led to the artificial separation of livestock and agriculture.

As the crops raised under green revolution shift more and more towards cash crops, fodder for livestock becomes even more scarce. On the other hand industrially or commercially raised livestock pose demands on the system and prime agricultural land gets diverted to grow grain and fodder for livestock. These changes in agricultural practices, are current reasons for small and marginal farmers in developing countries to sell their livestock assets. Recent surveys show alarming declines in the population of draft animals and livestock assets in the poorer households and landless groups in India.

At ANTHRA we are deeply concerned about the growing divide between agriculture and livestock and one of our efforts in working with small farmers has been to revitalize the organic link between small scale crop and livestock production which has greatly been lost with the large scale shift to chemical farming. Our programmes on ecological farming show small scale farmers an alternative they can easily practice and follow.