Mapping of farm-level sustainable land management indicators a case study of Nalatwad Watershed in Karnataka, India

Sustainability and sustainable farming have been widely used and defined differently to suit the situation and purpose for which they were used, interpreting sustainability as a system's ability to continue through time. This approach implicitly assumes that all the factors influencing sustainability have similar timeframe. In this paper, an attempt has been made to adequately define and assess the farm level sustainability indicators having a composite of three dimensions, namely, ecological, economic and social index with reference to spatial scale. Study was made in Nalatwad watershed, which is located in Nalatwad village, Muddebihal taluk Bijapur district, Karnataka. This study has developed an indexing approach and applied for characterizing and mapping of sustainable land management indicators at farm level. Sustainability of farming in the long run depends upon soil care and reducing the levels of land degradation. The marginal and small farmers are using less of external inputs and intensive cultivation to sustain farming and to manage the land resource for meeting their subsistence livelihood. The low level of sustainability among large farmers could well be attributed to lack of integrated approach to cultivation and poor farm management coupled with heavy dependence on purchased inputs.