We should all familiarise ourselves with terms such as “Agneyastra”, “Brahmastra” and “Neemastra”. The readers should not confuse them with new weapons meant to destroy enemy terror camps, but these are methods of treating seeds made out of natural ingredients. The previous two budgets by Nirmala Sitharaman ji has brought to limelight the concept of “Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF)”. Though not exactly a new concept, however the idea has been popularized by Mr. Subhash Palekar, a farmer from Amravati in Maharashtra. The low-cost environment friendly farming method is fast spreading across the country and according to the last year’s Economic Survey it is being implemented in 1431 clusters covering 972 villages involving over 1.63 lakh farmers.

ZBNF is, basically, a natural farming technique where cow dung and urine of indigenous cow breeds are used instead of urea and pesticides. It consumes only 10 percent of the water that crops consume in conventional methods. It also protects the soil from degradation. A team from Niti Aayog reached out to him sometime last year with the intention of helping double the income of farmers by 2022. The government has tasked the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) to study the efficacy of ZBNF results on both Kharif and Rabi crops before its nationwide roll out. 

It reduces farmers’ investment. There are no chemicals or insecticides used, which accounts for the maximum costs incurred by farmers today. The adoption of this farming practices promises to end a reliance on loans and drastically cut production costs, ending the debt cycle for desperate farmers. With one desi cow (for urine and dung) one can practice ZBNF on 30 acres and make profits from the very first year.  

Just as every story has two sides to it, the method has an equal number of critics who feel the idea will be a disaster and is nothing short of a joke for a country whose food requirements are growing by leaps and bounds.  Questions are raised over the technique's applicability across all soil types and agro-climatic zones. Though there are many who say that it suits all crops in all agro-climatic zones and it is possible to even grow horticulture products using this technique. 

Some experts have even gone to the extent and labelled ZBNF by farmers as unscientific and irrational. According to them it will actually deepens the agrarian crisis in India instead of solving it. They are calling it an ill thought out initiative of the Union government which has no basis in agriculture science. Another expert has commented that the yields are much lower when compared to modern scientific agriculture. 

Are these people, in the words of PM Modi, “professional pessimists”, or are their concerns really genuine? According to Subhash Palekar, ZBNF is the only way out to prevent farmer suicides, arrest rural migration and address the problems associated with global warming and climate change. He says that the yields would improve starting from the first year of the introduction of ZBNF.

If India is to become a $5 trillion economy in the next few years, the demand for raw materials such as cow dung, cow urine and organic manure will be huge and as a dairy farmer we hope that it is cow dung and not data which is the is the new oil. The country as a whole is debating the idea and the thought behind this method. Though there are many more such organic farming models such as Natural Farming, Rishi Farming, Vedic Farming, Cow Farming, Homa Farming, etc. however, it seems ZBNF will be the most hotly debated farming technique till 2022. 

Even if the method succeeds, the challenges on the agriculture front are many. Some of the key concerns are price support, marketing issues, cold chain facilities, knowledge gap, availability of quality seeds, unseasonal rains, droughts, lack of irrigation facilities, etc.