Farmers want to give up fertilisers but need policy support

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal to farmers on May 10 to reduce the use of chemical fertilisers by 25%-50% had shades of his Independence Day speeches in 2019 and 2025, in which he had appealed for the judicious use of chemical fertilisers.

In this time, India’s chemical fertiliser use has increased 15%, from 61.4 million metric tonnes to 70.8 million metric tonnes.

The latest appeal is prompted by the economic impact of the war in West Asia – in the same speech, Modi appealed for the judicious use of fuel, which like chemical fertilisers, has ingredients majorly sourced from countries in the affected region. His previous appeals have been inspired by the harmful effect of the indiscriminate use of chemical fertilisers on soil.

In both instances, however, just appealing to farmers to reduce the use of chemical fertilisers without speaking of and facilitating the alternative isn’t enough to motivate a switch to natural farming. Reducing the use of chemical fertilisers in soil that is habituated to their use causes a significant drop in yield.

For the use of urea to reduce by 50% without jeopardising yield and food security, intelligent measures to improve soil health through biofertilisers, biodecomposers, organic manuring and soil conditioners, followed by the right rate, dose, time and method of application of nano fertilisers are vital, according to Kiritkumar J Patel, managing director of the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative, a pan-India cooperative engaged in manufacturing and distributing fertilisers. Nano fertilisers are made of tiny-sized nutrient molecules coated for slow release.

A Union government-sponsored scheme launched in November 2024 to promote natural farming has so far covered 880,000 hectares, which is less than 1% of India’s 154.20 million hectares of cultivated land.

Natural farming primarily relies on locally made bio-inputs to activate soil biology and enhance the nutrient cycle, and breaking insect-pest and disease cycles through diversified cropping systems and the use of plant-based botanical formulations prepared from locally available plants, explained N. Ravisankar, project coordinator for All India Coordinated Research Projects on Integrated Farming Systems.

“It also integrates scientifically proven agronomic practices such as soil cover through crop residues and cover crops, minimum soil disturbance, biomass recycling and livestock integration for sustaining soil fertility and ecosystem functions,” said Ravisankar, who is also national principal investigator, All India Network Programme-Natural Farming Project Coordination Unit, Indian Council of Agricultural Research-Indian Institute of Farming Systems Research.

“To scale natural farming, we need policy changes, not prayers,” Avinash Kishore, senior research fellow in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit, International Food Policy Research Institute, told IndiaSpend.

Among the key policy changes Kishore advocates to further a switch to natural farming are an increase in chemical fertiliser prices, especially urea, which have so far been kept artificially low, and well-structured motivational incentives.

Natural farming is difficult

Ajay Rattan, an engineer by qualification and profession until 2018 when he took up natural farming on his family’s two hectares of land in Niyun in Himachal Pradesh’s Bilaspur district, was inspired, he said, “by the increasing shortage of indigenous seeds in the market, and also by the thought that if I continued with my chosen profession I would be financially well off but putting chemical-laden food on the table, which would adversely impact my family’s health.”

In both Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, states where IndiaSpend reached out to an academic and agricultural department officer respectively, inquiries about natural farming have increased after the recent pandemic.

“Covid-19 helped raise awareness of the association between food and immunity; many people realised that immunity levels are largely low,” Sohan Singh Walia, director and principal agronomist, School of Organic Farming, Punjab Agricultural University, told IndiaSpend.

Punjab Agricultural University first brought out a recommendation for natural farming in 2004. It established a department dedicated to organic farming in 2017. Still, today, Punjab has only 10,000 hectares of cultivated land under certified organic farming, less than 1% of the state’s total 4.2 million hectares, according to Walia.

In Himachal Pradesh, where the government has been making a conscious effort to promote natural farming since 2018, about 22% of the state’s one million farmers have adopted chemical-free farming so far, according to Mohinder Bhawani, deputy director agriculture and state nodal officer, State Project Implementing Unit, National Mission on Natural Farming, Himachal Pradesh.

Self-sufficiency is inbuilt in natural farming, as it makes use of products like jivamrit, ghanjivamrit, dashparni ark, saptadhayankur ark, etc, which are made of cow dung, cow urine and other natural ingredients like medicinal leaves, jaggery, etc. In an all-out effort to go natural, Rattan bought desi cows to make inputs from their waste. He acknowledges that “buying readymade urea to sprinkle on land is much easier than making biofertilisers at home”.

“The hard work involved in natural farming is a put-off,” opined GV Ramanjaneyulu, executive director, Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, even as he pointed out that the problem lies in putting forward two extremes.

“Either the government supports conventional farmers unrealistically, incurring up to Rs 2 lakh crore annually on fertiliser subsidies, or leaves them to fend for themselves if they decide to try natural farming,” he said.

Urea is cheap, widely available

Indian fertiliser company Indian Potash recently accepted an overseas tender for the supply of 2.5 million tons of urea at double the price Rashtriya ⁠Chemicals and Fertilisers, another leading provider, paid two months ago.

Such a steep price rise would majorly add to the central government’s outlay on fertiliser subsidies, especially the subsidy on urea, which completely insulates farmers from inflation.

A 45 kg bag of urea has cost roughly Rs 242 since two decades.

If in 2010 a farmer had to sell 27 kg of rice at the prevailing minimum support price to buy 50 kg of urea; today a farmer could buy it for only 12 kg of rice, pointed out Kishore. “At such low prices, it simply doesn’t make economic sense for farmers to use urea judiciously or consider the alternative, natural farming, which involves much more hard work.”

While urea supplements soil nitrogen, phosphatic and potassic (P&K) fertilisers deliver phosphate and potash.

“Of the three kinds of chemical fertilisers used, demand for urea is the most inelastic, especially in the short-term because it has a perceived direct link to yields,” said Kishore.

This perception tends to drive the overuse of urea, whereas in reality, the optimal blend of nitrogen, phosphate and potash depends on the type of crop, soil health, the growth phase, etc.

Prices of all these fertilisers are covered by the Nutrient Based Subsidy policy introduced in 2010. Every year, the government fixes the fertiliser subsidies (in Rs per kg) after considering international prices, exchange rates, inventory levels and prevailing Maximum Retail Prices.

However, while the MRP of P&K fertilisers has been left open to be set by fertiliser manufacturers and marketers based on market dynamics, the price of urea is tightly controlled, which has so far not only defeated the cause of natural farming but also led to its overuse, measured as poor nitrogen use efficiency.

Nitrogen use efficiency refers to the percentage of applied nitrogen fertiliser that is effectively absorbed by crops to produce biomass or yield. Globally, the average NUE is around 55% as against 33% in India, meaning almost 70% of the applied nitrogen our farmers use is lost to the surrounding environment.

“Lost urea degrades soil, contaminates aquifers and accelerates climate change, not to mention eats into farmers’ profits,” said Kishore.

“The excessive and imbalanced use of urea adversely affects soil health and does not necessarily increase yields proportionately,” agreed Patel of Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative. He believes that “instead of focusing on ‘reducing nutrition’ by cutting the use of urea, the messaging should be ‘improve nutrient efficiency’”.

Patel supports bringing urea under the purview of the NBS policy, on similar lines as P&K fertilisers, and introducing direct benefit transfers to farmers, to rationalise urea prices without adversely impacting livelihoods.

“Bangladesh increased urea prices from 16 Taka/kg to 22 Taka/kg in August 2022 and to 27 Taka/kg in April 2023, after freezing the rates for a decade, yet it saw no major farmer protests and no decline in food production,” pointed out Kishore.

IndiaSpend reached out to the department of fertilisers to understand if the subsidies on urea are likely to be revised to encourage a switch to natural farming. We were informed that the department has no plans to increase the prices of urea at present, in the interest of the farming community and the nation’s food security.

Incentives, assistance

Ramanjaneyulu believes farmers want to make the shift but they need assistance.

“Promoting small scale rural enterprises manufacturing the inputs needed for natural farming would be helpful to farmers as well as promote the rural economy,” he proposed.

“Alternative nutrient solutions must be made available at scale for balanced fertilisation,” agreed Patel.

Even if natural inputs were to be produced locally, Ramanjaneyulu said, “farmers would need equitable subsidies at least on par with chemical fertilisers to cover their costs and the losses when they first make the switch.”

Rattan’s yield fell 50% in his first couple of years of natural farming but has since increased 25% as compared to what he was harvesting with chemical fertilisers.

Well-thought out incentives could also help to push change. An incentive structure could be built around motivating a switch from cereal monocultures to growing a pulse crop with rice or wheat or maize (multi-cropping) or growing a pulse crop between cereal crops (inter-cropping), because pulses help restore nitrogen to depleted soil.

“Sowing crops like Dhaincha or Sunn hemp after harvesting wheat, and mixing the crop into the soil after 45-60 days replenishes the nitrogen in the soil, to the extent that basmati rice grown thereafter needs no urea at all and ordinary rice needs half the amount of urea,” explained Walia.

Technically, this is called green manuring.

Rattan’s experience has been that the leguminous crop (chick peas or peas) he grows alongside wheat to fixate nitrogen in the soil covers his farming expense, which has increased his return three times.

“Multi-location trials conducted by ICAR under AINP-NF across different agro-ecologies also demonstrate that natural farming can maintain comparable productivity in several low-input and legume/pulse/millet-based cropping systems while significantly reducing paid-out costs on fertilisers and pesticides, and improving soil organic carbon, microbial activity, soil moisture retention and overall soil physical, chemical and biological health parameters over time,” said Ravisankar.

Incentives to promote balanced fertilisation could also cover the adoption of soil test-based fertiliser recommendations, precision farming practices and efficient nutrient-use technologies, proposed Patel.

To impact the actual application of urea and other fertilisers, Kishore emphasised, incentives need to be aligned with the dissemination of credible scientific recommendations.

“Farmers also need access to authentic knowledge, local advisories, inputs and a market for their produce to create demand pull,” said Ramanjaneyulu.

In Punjab, the state government has created mandis (markets) for organic crops, where they fetch 50% higher prices than regular crops, said Walia. “There is no shortage of demand for organic crops in Punjab, especially after the pandemic. Some organic produce like mustard is grown on demand and fully booked in advance.”

The ICAR, through the AINP-NF, has taken up research on natural farming across 20 centres in 16 states. Under the National Mission on Natural Farming, model farms are being established at identified ICAR institutes and state agricultural universities, and competitive research grants are available to generate long-term scientific evidence on productivity, profitability, soil health, ecosystem services and climate resilience.

However, so far, investments in research and extension, a base to develop new products, have been skewed towards conventional chemical fertilisers, Ramanjaneyulu believes, because academicians employed in universities and institutions at large “don’t believe in the model and have refused to shift”.

“We need research into indigenous seeds that aren’t dependent on chemical fertilisers,” Rakesh Tikait, national spokesperson of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, told IndiaSpend. “It’s easy to say switch to natural farming but even the seeds available today demand chemical fertilisers.”

Scaling and support

Switching over to natural farming overnight could be disastrous. A good example of this is the impact of the nationwide ban on chemical fertilisers imposed by Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2021, to follow through on his electoral commitment to replace the existing fertiliser subsidy scheme with an alternative system and promote the use of organic fertiliser over a period of 10 years.

Rajapaksa’s ban led to a more than 99% drop in fertiliser imports in the ensuing four months, and a more than 30% drop in the yield of rice, Sri Lanka’s primary food crop, from a high of 4,500 kg/hectare in 2020 to below 3,000 kg/hectare in the ensuing major growing season running from September to March (Maha), based on government statistics or remote sensing estimates. Consequently, rice imports, which were negligible prior to the ban, shot up to $450 million while domestic prices of the staple surged by around 50%.

Yields of Sri Lanka’s primary export and source of foreign exchange, tea, dropped 28.7% in 2022 as compared to the average yield of the 2014-2021 period.

Although Prime Minister Modi has appealed to farmers at large, to balance sustainability with national food security, instead of endorsing natural farming across India, the ICAR has identified potential domains for a transition through a strategic agro-ecological assessment integrating bio-physical and socio-economic indicators.

“About 8.01 million hectares fall under highly potential domains while another 29.37 million hectares under medium potential domains, together accounting for nearly 25.8% of India’s net cultivated area,” explained Ravisankar.

In 2023, a NITI Aayog working paper proposed that nearly 20% of India’s cultivated area be gradually brought under chemical-free farming by 2030. This target accounted for the projected annual growth of about 3.5% in food production against an estimated 2.8% annual increase in food demand.

“A phased scaling of natural farming in ecologically suitable areas will avoid risks associated with the abrupt withdrawal of conventional inputs and facilitate an evidence-based agro-ecological transition,” said Ravisankar. “A phased expansion strategy will also help generate long-term scientific evidence for wider scaling and policy support.”

IndiaSpend has reached out to the department of agricultural research and education to inquire on research on seeds suited for natural farming. We will update this story when we receive a response.

Charu Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.

This article first appeared on IndiaSpend, a data-driven and public-interest journalism non-profit.