Degree in Natural Farming – A new diploma and graduate degree programme in Agricultural Sciences

The natural farming (NF) will be new beginning of environmentally friendly in-situ management of plant, soil and water. Different types in indigenous farming practices by the stakeholders over the time and achieved mastery in these practices will be the beginning of natural farming as a concept. These practices include, rishi krishi, zero budget natural farming, Natueco culture, Panchagavya farming, do nothing farming and homa farming or Agnihotri farming. Increasing constructive reports on such practices, state level activities and promotional programme and policy by different national agencies such as NITI AYOG creates constructive environment of inculcating the NF degree programme. Being new degree and diploma programme, several new courses and their curricula are introduced. Therefore, the attempt is made herewith in this article to discuss major highlight of natural farming graduate programme. According to Dean Committee Report (DCR) there are three different programme is going viz., UG-Certificate (Natural Farming) UG-Diploma (Natural Farming) and Bachelor of Science Agriculture (Honours) Natural Farming. The degree programme consist of 176 credit hours to be completed in four hours with core courses (for 111 credit hours), multi-disciplinary courses (for 9 credit hours), value added courses (for 6 credit hours), ability enhancement courses (for 8 credit hours), skill enhancement courses (for 12 credit hours), internship/ project/ student READY (for 20 credit hours), non-gradial courses (for 4 credit hours) and online courses or massive online open courses (MOOC) (for 10 credit hours). The multiple entry and exit, online courses, more opportunity of selecting elective courses and student READY (Rural Entrepreneurship Awareness Development Yogaja) are the major significant highlight of natural framing degree programme. In nutshell, with introduction of natural farming in formal education the indigenous technologies were more surfaced in agricultural education in India. The natural farming education addressing environmental responsive, diversification, integrated farming system, agrobiology with skill enhancement of student and hence will be a worthy to introduce natural farming in agricultural education.