The Kashmir Valley is famous for its fertile soil and has long produced cereals and fruit. The alluvial plains of the Jhelum and its tributaries, as well as the plateaus formed by the sediments of former lakes, have provided an ideal environment for agriculture. But this natural fertility is now mostly memory. Beginning in the 1970’s there has been a decline in soil health, driven largely by how the soil is being fed. 

From Farmyard to Fertilizer

In the 1970s, most of the nutrient management in Kashmir was organic and cyclical. Farmyard manure, cattle and sheep dung, crop residues, and fallowing and crop rotations (e.g., rice-mustard) returned nutrients to the soil. The availability of free or subsidized chemical fertilizers changed this. Yields increased. Farmers gradually replaced organic and traditional farming practices with synthetic fertilizers.

This change, coupled with an emphasis on high-value crops, especially fruit, created an even greater demand for greater and more frequent inputs. The area under fruit cultivation increased from about 82,000 hectares in the mid-1970s to over 3.3 lakh hectares in 2020. Intensified apple plantations, which require more inputs than traditional farming, added further stress on the soil. At the same time, livestock holdings shrank, rural labor shifted away from farming, and the supply of well-rotted manure thinned. The fertilizer bag became the default answer to........

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