Draught Animal Power: Opportunities and Challenges in Mountain Agriculture

Abstract

Climate change is a global phenomenon and agriculture is also drastically affected by the change with increasing fossil fuel consumption coupled with increased usage of agricultural machinery. Agriculture in the mountains is changing drastically; moreover, farm mechanization has also increased with introduction of power tillers. But with increasing climate change, there is need to maintain the existing animate eco-friendly power sources for agricultural operations i.e. draught animals. Hence, a study was conducted in the hilly state of northern India, Uttarakhand to know the opportunities and challenges associated with draught animals in mountain agriculture and data was collected from 240 draught animal rearing farmers through a semi-structured schedule. Analytical hierarchy process was used to see the weightage of different factors in four dimensions based on field observation. The study revealed that “means of agricultural workforce” (with a global priority score of 0.116); “insufficient fodder” (with a global priority score of 0.118); “animal friendly implements” (with a global priority score of 0.104) and “high demand of dairy animals” (with a global priority score of 0.116) were the most important strength, weakness, opportunity and threat identified respectively.