Toxicological Effects of Herbicides in a Nitrogen Fixing System: Hand-prints for Sustainable Development

Environmental foot prints to environmental handprints: Environment friendly agricultural practices are a set of tools available to us to live wisely. Grain legumes not only provide protein rich food, but fixes the Nitrogen in the atmosphere as part of natural material cycling process. Intercroping is an environment friendly practice to smother weeds without use of any chemicals. If the intercrop is also a legume, land surface is converted to a natural nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing unit. A grain crop in succession on the same land will benefit from the nutrient enrichment from the previous legume crop. Dr. Jacob Thomas gives an assessment of both environment friendly agricultural systems and chemical farming in an experiment. This research demonstrates that farming systems should be developed for each farm considering its unique bio-diversity in soil and other edaphological conditions. When the natural resource capital of a farm is fully understood, better environment friendly technologies can be adopted.