Table 6. Recommended and Indigenous Soil and Water Conservation Practices.
Hilly, High Rainfall Areas. Bangalore District, Karnataka; Baruch District, Gujarat

Item Practices
 Recommended Indigenous

 Soil conservation Continuous graded bunds Stone bunds on the boundary
 (across the major slope)

 Moisture conservation Contour farming Frequent shallow tillage and
 interculture

 Runoff disposal Central waterways Boundary waterways

 Gully control Stone checks to stabilize Stone checks on boundary to
 gullies harvest soil and reclaim gullies

 Water harvesting Farm pond More investigation needed


 Farmers will not accept contour bunds alongside boundary bunds because they take up too much
 space on the small farms. They also refuse to accept contour bunds without boundary bunds,
because the soil below the contour bunds will move downhill to the neighbour's field.

Conventional graded and contour bunding systems appear to be suitable only where land holdings
are large or tractors are used. If plots are large, preferably covering an entire microwatershed, the
central waterways do not cause a clash of interest among farmers. But large plots are rare in India.
It is not surprising that the conventional bunding system, which was developed for large farms in
the United States and tested successfully on institutional farms in India, continues to be rejected
by small farmers.

Contour bunds will not gain widespread acceptance on small farms, and to recommend that
farmers build them is a wasted effort. Rather, SWC programmes must adapt, possibly by
promoting boundary bunds, which are far more readily accepted than contour bunds. To take the
opposite approach promoting contour bunds would require a very ambitious programme to
change boundary lines to match contours. This would be very complicated, requiring institutional
and legal changes as well as much cooperation among farmers. Moreover, in the Indian SAT, soil
quality often varies significantly over very small areas, inhibiting plot exchange (Walker and
Ryon, 1990). Research on boundary bunds is needed to compare their efficiency with that of
contour bunds on small plots.

It is important to note that the Indian SAT and West African SAT, where much similar research
has been done, differ in acceptance of contour bunds. Research from West Africa suggests that
contour bunds are much more readily accepted than in India (Reij, 1991; Critchley, 1990). More
work is needed to understand location-specific conditions that affect SWC technology adoption.


Farmers Invest in Conservation as a Byproduct of Productivity

Indigenous SWC designs suggest that conservation measures are most likely to be adopted if they


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