Bio-enhancers: A potential tool to improve soil fertility, plant health in organic production of horticultural crops

Indiscriminate use of agro-chemicals during the last 5–6 decades has adversely affected the soil fertility, crop productivity, produce quality and particularly the environment. Annually India is loosing nearly 0.8 million tones of nitrogen, 1.8 millions tones of Phosphorus and 26.3 million tones of potassium (Annonymous, 2011). Soil organic carbon content in most of the Indian soils has been reduced to > 0.5 per cent. The green revolution is exhibiting second generation problem owing to over exploitation and mis management of soil. Under these circumstances, maintenance of soil fertility and crop productivity are the major constraints in agriculture. Excessive mining of micronutrients have led to the deficiency of micro nutrients in one or the other parts of the country. As a result fertigation is becoming popular in most part of the states. It is pertinent to pinpoint that at present, most of the soluble fertilizers are imported in the country and these are very expensive, beyond the reach of the common farmers. For number of nutrients, soluble fertilizers are not available. Hence, this requires change in mind set for addressing this issue. After closely working with Organic Farming Systems for over a decade, we are of the view that “Bio enhancers” could be a cheap and alternative tool to resolve many issues including cheap and effective alternative for fertigation. In organic production systems, there is always a challenge of how to improve soil fertility, crop productivity and management of pests by organic techniques. Use of organic liquid preparations has been an age old practice in India. On farm produced Kunapajala, prepared by fermenting animal flesh along with herbal products used to be an established technique in ancient India. As an alternative, number of organic farmers devised organic boosters based on local experiences and gave specific names such as Amritpani, Panchagavya, Beejamrita, Jiwamrita etc. Similarly, in other organic farming systems, few effective preparations such as BD-500, BD-501, Cow Pat Pit, Biodynamic liquid manures and in Homa Organic Farming: Agnihotra ash enriched water and Biosol are effective tools being used by number of organizations. It is interesting to note that in all these preparations, the basic ingredients are cow based products. In order to give generic name, hence forth, these are named as “Bio enhancer” which is almost new to the world and scientific community. Review of available literature with bio enhancer indicates that there is immense scope for its promotion in agriculture. Hence, we have tried to review the available information with objectives to communicate scientific community to initiate systematic research, extension agencies to promote these as cheap alternatives of agro chemicals and farmers to prepare their own products and utilize them as per requirement.