Gazing at his family’s estimated 20 hectare (ha) of agricultural land in Punjab’s Bhaini Mehraj village, 29-year-old Sukhvinder Singh is a worried man.
“In the coming years, all this land will be barren.”
However, the look of the land belies his disquiet. It’s the ongoing Kharif season in India, and like many other farmers in the state, Singh’s field is flourishing with paddy crop, as far as the eye can see.
Pointing towards the soil under his feet, he told Down To Earth (DTE),“Imagine someone on a ventilator (life support) who is being kept alive artificially. Our soil is bereft of life in the same way and we are spoon-feeding it with chemical fertilisers for the support it needs. Organically, it has lost its capacity to yield a harvest that can fetch us a good price.”
Singh’s 60-year-old father Kewal Singh has accompanied him to the field and it was he who used to tend to the same land before his son.
“The chemicals are working. Until the day comes when they won’t,” he said, sounding similar to a dire prophecy.
What happens when the soil doesn’t have the ability to grow a healthy and a high-yielding crop on its own?
Punjab, lauded with titles like the ‘food bowl’ and the ‘breadbasket of India’, has been witness to innumerable schemes aimed at improving its agricultural practices.
It’s been a decade for the popular soil health card (SHC) scheme, years of programmes related to crop diversification and sustainable groundwater management but on the ground, quite literally, the soils are only deteriorating.
Farmers from the state narrate the story of what years of intensive cultivation and over-extraction of nutrients by unsuitable crops has done to their natural resource base.
Around 25 years ago, the same soil was teeming with life – from earthworms to beetles in abundance.
“Ab dekhne ko nahi milta [now they are not found here]. Chemicals finished everything,” said the 60-year-old.
Ten years ago, Sukhvinder realised that both rice and wheat yields are dropping every year.
Around 2014-15, the yield was 95 quintals and 70 quintals per ha in paddy and wheat respectively. Today, with the same quantity of chemical fertilisers, the average yield of paddy and wheat from one ha is 85 quintals and 65 quintals respectively.
Now for the same yield they used to get, the family is forced to use more fertilisers per ha.
When compared to the time Kewal was farming the land some 20 years ago, his family is using at least 350 per cent more urea (one of the most important nitrogenous fertilisers) than used in the past – from 1.25 quintals per ha of paddy to 5.6 quintals.
In total, the farm needs 15 bags of urea (one bag has 45 kg) for paddy, wheat, and maize combined in one year, as opposed to four to five bags some 20 years ago.
It was in 2015 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the SHC scheme. Under this scheme, soil samples are tested with an aim to promote balanced use of fertilisers to ensure that farmers are aware about the appropriate amount of nutrients required for a particular crop.
But in these nine years, Sukhvinder has never seen such a card or had his soil tested under the scheme.
According to the scheme manual, the tests are done on 12 parameters — nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, sulphur, zinc, iron, copper, manganese, boron, soil salinity, soil pH, and Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) — following which personalised fertiliser recommendations are provided to the farmers.
Confined largely on paper, the scheme has been ineffective in dealing with the menace of fertiliser overuse.
DTE spoke to scores of farmers from Punjab, Haryana, and Madhya Pradesh to understand the relevance of the scheme. Merely a few said that their soils have been tested under the programme and of those, some didn’t receive the card, while others felt that the results were not reliable.
Randeep Singh from Patti Khattar village in Sehna block of Punjab’s Barnala district said when the scheme started in the village in 2017-18, the local agriculture office in Sehna block, under which the village falls, was found to be understaffed to collect the soil samples. Hence, the government officials asked the farmers to volunteer in collecting soil samples.
Randeep was one of the volunteers.
“We collected so many samples, it filled an entire office room,” he said.
But when the test reports came, the farmers were perplexed to find that most of those had the same results and recommendations. “We found it useless. How can every farm have the same results?” asks Randeep.
In response, Jaswinder Singh, Block Technology Manager at Agriculture Office in Sehna block pointed out that this might be happening because there may not be major variations in the soil in a certain village.
The block office started soil testing around four years back on a mass scale and gave recommendations to the farmers. “But many farmers didn’t follow. Today, only 20 per cent farmers in the block get their soils tested and follow our recommendations,” said Jaswinder.
Of the total 2.266 million soil samples tested in India in 2024-25, only 2,587 were from Punjab.
Every crop season, Sehna block office targets one village for collection of soil samples. In the 2024-25 Kharif season, officials collected 1,600 samples at the block level from a village, against the target of 2,200 samples.
It is evident that the scheme has been marred by an acute shortage of agricultural staff and infrastructure. Till date, farmers have no option but to take the samples themselves and deliver them to the government labs, one of the reasons that the scheme lost steam quickly.
Sitting in his soil laboratory in an old run-down building that functions as an agriculture office in Barnala district, Agriculture District Officer Jasmine Sidhu said if soil tests have to be done effectively, the office needs 60 per cent more staff and better infrastructure.
The laboratory has been marked as ‘unsafe’.
“Sometimes cement falls from the roof. This is not a safe place even for sitting, let alone working in a lab. Moreover, we are working at 40 per cent capacity,” he said.
Take for instance KVK (Krishi Vigyan Kendra) of Barnala district. The soil sampling division has just one scientist, who manages 157 villages.
“With my other administrative work, how much time do I have left to go to the field,” said Suryendra Singh, assistant professor, agronomy, KVK, Barnala. These KVKs are a network of farm science centres that provide agriculture extension services.
Over the last few months, the KVK has shut down its soil testing facility as the results were not reliable due to a technological error. The soil tests are now conducted at the district agriculture office where Sidhu sits.
“There should be at least two soil testing laboratories in each district. Many farmers don’t even know that soil tests are being done,” he said.
According to preliminary estimates, 2024 will record a bumper production of rice in India. In Punjab, area covered by rice in the current season is 3.24 million ha as of September 20. The wheat crop harvested before paddy was also a record production. But these optimistic figures don’t enthuse Gulab Singh.
“This is a dead land,” he said.
Gulab, who farms 5.4 ha with chemical fertilisers and 0.6 ha with organic farming in Tapa village, has been working with Kheti Virasat Mission (KVM), a non-governmental organisation in Punjab, promoting organic farming and paddy straw management practices.
In 2016, he had tried to shift his entire 6 ha to organic farming but after facing a loss in yield, he switched back to chemical farming on 5.4 ha. He recognises the negative effects of chemical farming and is working towards gradually trying to reduce the dependence on inorganic fertilisers.
“Chemical farming is feeding us but at what cost?” he pondered.
Around six months ago, KVM got soil from farmers’ fields from four districts — Moga, Patiala, Faridkot, and Bhatinda tested and the results showed that average SOC was between 0.3 and 0.8.
According to the agriculture department of Punjab, SOC should be at least 1 per cent.
In Punjab, the percentage of soils high in organic carbon is just 6.9 per cent and this figure has come down in 2024-25, compared to the previous year.
Overall, 17.9 per cent of Indian soils are in the ‘high’ category.
Umendra Dutt, founding member and executive director of KVM, points out that this is happening because the soil’s ability to absorb carbon has deteriorated to a great extent. The result is a loss of soil structure, stability, and aggregation.
“Organic carbon is like an FD (fixed deposit) that earns us interest. But now we have broken it,” Raspinder Singh, who also works with KVM, puts it.
This also implies that paddy and wheat, two staple crops of India, are being grown on fatigued soils, potentially affecting nutrition and health of the country’s population, as macro/micronutrient value of resulting crops is poorer.
Many farmers whom DTE spoke with believe that without chemicals, the land would give them just about 25 quintals of rice or wheat in a hectare.
Not only that, soils have hardened over the years, losing their water holding or percolation capacity.
Year after year, a majority of farmers sow paddy by the soil puddling method, a universal practice for wetland rice cultivation. It involves churning the soil with standing water of 5-10 cm depth for weeks before transplanting rice seedlings.
This method, repeated over decades now, has created a dense and compacted sub-surface layer, which impedes the infiltration of water into lower soil layers and underground aquifers.
In the process, the water holding and recharge capacity of the soil is lost and farmers face the brunt of this, both when it rains heavily and when there is a rainfall deficit.
Many farmers talk about formation of an impermeable ‘plate’ at a depth of 6-7 inches, because of which during excess rainfall, the fields get flooded quickly and even remain flooded for next few days as quick water absorption is blocked.
Similarly, the water holding capacity is also affected. “If there is water deficit and the plant doesn’t get water for two days, it will wilt,” said Randeep who farms on 6.4 ha.
He adds that along with water percolation, movement of earthworms or other insects is also restricted because of this phenomenon.
“There was a time when tractors getting stuck inside the soft soil used to be a common sight during ploughing the field. Now the case is reverse. The soil is so hard that once we harvest a crop, then without watering the field, the tractor doesn’t plough properly. Usually, it doesn’t plough beyond 6-7 inches of surface,” he told DTE.
But what has led to this degradation?
The answer lies in a vicious loop. Overuse of fertilisers, pesticides, and groundwater, along with the rampant practise of stubble burning, has led to soil degradation, which in turn is hitting the yields, and once again leading to an increase in fertilisers and pesticides use.
Punjab tops the country in its total use of fertilisers such as nitrogen, phosphate, and potash. As per the data given by the Union Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers in Rajya Sabha on August 6, 2024, the state consumed 247.61 kg of fertilisers per ha during 2023-24. This is almost double the national average of 139.81 kg per ha.
While the state accounts for only 1.53 per cent of the country’s agricultural area, it uses around nine per cent of the total fertilisers used in India.
Over the last four decades, there has been a steady rise in the consumption of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium) fertilisers—increasing by 180 per cent between 1980 to 2018.
Usage of urea (N) alone increased by 202 per cent between 1980 and 2018.
Over the years, the soils started demanding more, alluded Bhojraj Bawa, a farmer from Pharwahi village.
For him, after years of doing the paddy-wheat cycle, the colour is also a crucial factor. “Till I see a dark green colour, which implies a good yield, I will have to feed more urea to the crop, otherwise there is a risk of a low return.”
Meanwhile, overuse of fertilisers is no secret.
Government officials that DTE spoke to admitted that while in average conditions, the recommended urea usage is 0.9 quintals and 1.1 quintals per acre (0.4 ha) in paddy and wheat respectively but farmers use at least 0.4-0.6 quintals more than the recommended quantity.
“But farmers can’t reduce their usage overnight. It has to be a slow year by year process, otherwise yields will fall drastically,” said Suryendra Singh, KVK Barnala scientist.
Next come the pesticides. Punjab is the third highest consumer of chemical pesticides in the country, following Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Sidhu explains that the usage of pesticides also increases with fertilisers.
One of the adverse effects of excess use of fertilisers is that it leads to an increase in vegetative growth, which means the crop will be dark green, which in turn attracts more pest and insect attacks and diseases.
“The food for insects and pests is the fluid inside the leaf. The bulkier the leaf is, the more food it has for pests and insects,” he said.
In contrast to the massive increase in fertiliser consumption in the state between 1980 and 2018, the increase in yield of paddy and wheat during the same period was just 68 and 85 per cent respectively.
Meanwhile, groundwater levels have been plummeting while farmers have been drilling tube wells up to 500 feet to access water.
Barnala district, under which Patti Khattar village falls, is in the Malwa region of Punjab, which is south of the river Sutlej. It has most of its blocks under the ‘dark’ zone, which refers to over-exploited levels of groundwater, as per assessment by the Central Ground Water Board.
“Rice has caused a lot of loss to Punjab. It is turning the state into a desert. There are 1.4 million tube wells in Punjab which run for eight hours during the paddy season,” said Jaswinder Singh, from Sehna block office.
He explains that one inch water on one ha land equals to one lakh litre. “In Punjab at least 4-5 inches of water is standing during paddy season. Every year water level drops by 3-5 feet in the state,” he said.
A state level committee, constituted to study water table depletion, had predicted in 2021 that the state will turn into a desert in the next 25 years if the current trend of drawing groundwater continues.
The need to feed a growing population ushered in the Green Revolution in India and with it came the rice wheat cropping system (RWCS), where these crops are grown repeatedly on the same ground. The high-yielding varieties introduced since the 1960s helped India achieve food security and still play a major role in sustaining it, however, the RWCS has caused huge unintended consequences, including draining the soil.
This was further buoyed by subsidised fertilisers and Punjab quickly became the most intensively cultivated region in the country with a cropping intensity of about 190 per cent, meaning thereby that, on average, 1.9 crops are harvested per unit area per year.
The RWCS also led to the widespread practise of stubble burning, which has contributed to poor soil microbial activity and caused a decline of mycorrhiza (a type of fungi) in the soil. Mycorrhiza’s role in the soil is to help plant roots absorb more nutrients.
Post-paddy harvest residue burning in Punjab and Haryana is widespread from October end till mid-November each year because farmers have to harvest rice and sow wheat in a span of 10-15 days.
“Mycorrhiza converts nitrogen into ammonium, which plants can absorb and use. If your field doesn’t have fungi or necessary bacteria, then how much ever fertiliser you put, it is just going in the gap,” said Gulab.
He got his soil tested in 2022 from Punjab Agriculture University (PAU) and found that the potash in his soil was significantly higher than required.
“All over Punjab if the soils are tested, you will not find any deficiency of fertilisers. The problem is much graver. Even when the nutrient is more than required, the plant is not being able to absorb it because the mycorrhiza the soil needs to make that fertiliser in absorbable condition for the plant is absent,” he said.
Crop diversification has been a topic of discussion in Punjab since the late 1980s when the first recommendations for diversifying the cropping pattern of Punjab away from the dominant paddy-wheat cycle came from a committee constituted under economist SS Johl.
Over the years, different governments at the central and state level came up with their own policies. But these policies have not brought desired results of ending monoculture.
Talking about the farming culture of Punjab before the paddy-wheat cycle took over, Randeep said, “Cotton was one of the main crops at one time. The soil used to be soft then because cotton doesn’t need as much water or irrigation as paddy. In that soft soil, the roots of the cotton plant used to go deeper and benefit from mycorrhiza in the soil. Now, cotton farming has collapsed completely.”
The Malwa region was once called the dry belt of Punjab and had dry crops like cotton, jowar (sorghum), bajra (pearl millet), gwar (cluster bean), and pulses.
“Many years ago, after one season of wheat, in the next season farmers used to skip wheat and sow chana (chickpea) or gwar. This cycle was broken during the Green Revolution,” says Randeep.
Even many years after the Green Revolution this was the trend. But assured and good returns on paddy and wheat made farmers abandon these.
Farmers like Randeep were sowing cotton until 20 years ago. But with low returns and years of pest attacks on BT cotton, farmers have now either significantly reduced the area under the crop or done away with it completely.
One of the major reasons for failure of crop diversification has been low returns and the absence of an assured market for other crops, which has led farmers to continue with the conventional cropping patterns.
Before each crop season, the Centre announces MSP (minimum support price) for 23 crops, but on the ground, only two or three crops like paddy, wheat and at times soybean are purchased at the announced prices by the government. The rest are bought by private traders, who have no legal binding to purchase at MSP or above.
Nitrogen fixing crops like legumes do not have an assured market. Moong (green gram) saw the highest-ever acreage this year in the state, at 67,000 ha. But farmers were forced to sell it below MSP, at Rs 6,000 per quintal (MSP is Rs 8,682 per quintal) to private players.
“Crop diversification without procurement diversification in (agriculturally) intensive regions is a pipe dream” said N Raghuram, Head, Centre for Sustainable Nitrogen and Nutrient Management, School of Biotechnology, GGS Indraprastha University.
A legal guarantee for MSP for all crops was one of the main demands of the landmark 2020-21 Indian farmers’ protests. Several farmers have been protesting again this year since February for the same.
Is Organic farming an obvious solution?
Ravdeep Singh’s 2.4 ha organic farm stands out like an oasis in a desert. Out of the total, 0.4 ha is under agroforestry. He cultivates crops from paddy and wheat to maize, bajra, ragi (finger millet), jowar , 40 varieties of seasonal vegetables and fruits, sugarcane, and turmeric.
“You can’t even imagine the quantity of total pesticides and fertilisers I used to put in chemical farming, especially in vegetables,” says Ravdeep, who is the only farmer in Pharwahi village to completely switch to organic farming—both for commercial purposes and self-consumption.
It was in 2011 when he made the extreme step of switching in one go. In 2009, his mother was diagnosed of cancer. “While there may be several reasons for that, we can’t deny that the intensive agricultural practices have contributed to diseases,” he said.
Six years ago, when he got his soil tested, the organic carbon in his agricultural soils had improved to 1.35. Now, he believes, it would be between 2 and 3. Before 2011, this was less than 0.5.
The soil texture has changed significantly. “It has become soft. Now the field requires ploughing just twice a year. During chemical farming, I used to do it at least three to four times before sowing paddy in a span of one and a half months,” he said.
Insects he hadn’t seen since his childhood have returned to his field. Picking up an insect he knows as ‘kumyar’, he remarked, “If this comes to your field, it means your soil is healing.”
Since 2011, he hasn’t used any pesticides. “Pests come sometimes but it is always a limited attack that I can survive,” he said.
But how are the yields?
In 2011, when it was his first year venturing into organic farming, the yield in different crops was normal. From 2012, it started declining rapidly. “Now it has stabilised more or less. But till date it has not come at the level that I used to get with chemical fertilisers. Especially, in rice and wheat, the yield is still less,” he said.
For example, the average yield from one ha wheat is 50 quintals through chemical farming and after 13 years of organic farming, his yield has reached only 38 quintals.
“It started with 20 ha in 2011-12,” he informed DTE.
That is the primary reason most farmers have not been able to shift significant land area towards chemical free farming.
Some 3-4 km away from Ravdeep’s field, is Sandeep Bawa’s farm. He is aware of Ravdeep’s switch to organic and agreed that chemical farming has not only affected human health but also soil health. In the same breath he admits that he cannot afford to go fully organic, even in the next 10 years.
“If we shift totally, the yields will drop drastically. It will take at least four to five years for the yield to stabilise. How will we meet our expenses during that time? We will be finished,” he said.
In 2014, Gulab experimented with shifting 0.6 ha from his 6 ha to organic farming. After two years, he decided to go fully organic like Ravdeep. And in 2018, he suffered a huge loss of one lakh per ha and couldn’t even recover the production cost from the yields. In 2018, he switched again to chemical farming in 5.4 ha, while keeping 0.6 ha under organic for self-consumption.
Many farmers said there has been a historical trend of kitchen gardens and growing a few vegetables under organic farming but in the last few years, many of them have shifted to complete organic farming for their own food.
This has not been driven by some national or state level scheme but by concerns regarding their own health. “We have been able to think only about how we can eat better. We have not reached a stage where we can afford to make the country eat better,” said Gulab.
Meanwhile, at Sukhvinder’s farm, the family started keeping 0.8 ha aside for vegetable cultivation under organic farming for self-consumption in 2018. After five years, they saw earthworms returning on this small patch of land.
“But the rest (19.8 ha) is doomed,” said Kewal.
This story was produced with support from Earth Journalism Network for its collaborative report on soils in the Asia Pacific, “Ground Truths.”