Fifteen years of organic farming under modified land configuration improves crop diversification and ecosystem services in the eastern Himalayas

Extensive valley lands in the Eastern Himalayas remain uncultivated after the rainy-season rice crop due to water seepage from surrounding hills, leading to reduced productivity and deterioration of soil health. Adopting organic farming with modified land configuration can enhance crop intensity, farm income, and several ecosystem services. Thus, the long-term field experiment was conducted, including 03 vegetable-based CS on raised beds and 08 rice-based sequences on sunken beds. The carrot-okra sequence achieved the highest mean rice equivalent yield (REY) and net return (NR), followed by potato-okra and French bean-okra, respectively. In sunken beds, the rice (cv. Shahsarang 1)-pea sequences had the highest pooled mean REY and NR. Long-term organic farming significantly ( p < 0.05) improved soil chemical, physical, and biological properties under both raised and sunken beds, indicating better soil health for sustainable crop production. Further, the energy use efficiency and energy productivity were recorded as greater in the carrot-okra sequence and rice (Shahsarang-1)-pea under raised and sunken beds, respectively. More interestingly, the French bean-okra had the highest water productivity, followed by the potato-okra sequence. Thus, in a nutshell, the vegetable-based systems on raised beds and rice-legume systems on sunken beds emerged as more efficient and sustainable options for improving productivity, profitability, and ecosystem services in the fragile hill ecologies.