Can organic agriculture replace present cultural practices?
The organic agriculture has its own limits. It can be practised in Pakistan, but after use of fertilisers and chemicals for or the past 40 years, we cannot easily get away from the existing system. It does not involve any use of bio-technology, farm chemicals and high energy inputs. It is labour intensive, but is economic only if proper guidance and training is given. It is readily adaptable to field corps, but is difficult to adopt to horticultural crops, which need timely operation of high inputs; for example nitrogen comes from farm wastes and legumes grown and ploughed in, potassium from granite industry dust, phosphates by reducing pH of soil, as well as bone and fish meal and farm yard manure. Diseases are controlled by extracts of many plants and these are not readily obtainable, micro nutrients in form of natural metallic sulphates, chlorides which are permitted for spraying and not by ground application and yet all are slow to work and for many diseases there are no natural ch
