Good practices and lessons learnt from innovative horticultural farmers for enhancing profitability and sustainability

New innovations and best practices are the key to success, growth and sustenance of horticulture. Research has shown that farmers are a rich source of indigenous knowledge and practice; they experiment, adopt and innovate continuously, therefore documentation of the same may provide insight and role model for the other farmers as well as scientists. Study was framed to document and analyse the best practices of innovative horticultural farmers. A total 35 innovative farmers from ten agro-climatic zones of Karnataka were selected. Data were collected through personal interview of the farmers and participant observations by the researcher. The net returns of farmers ranged between Rupees 1.44 lakh to 277 lakh per annum. The B:C ratio of the enterprises was higher than 1.7, indicating sufficiently higher returns. Farmers had integrated 3 to 6 enterprises, viz. crop husbandry, floriculture, vegetables, fruits, dairy and livestock rearing for efficient use and recycling of farm resources. To increase economic viability of the farms, farmers had integrated production with post-harvest processing, value addition and marketing of the products. The study found that irrespective of farmers' socio-economic backgrounds and agro-ecological conditions, agriculture can be economically viable and sustainable by their innovations; integration of technologies and enterprises; adoption of new technology and overcoming false beliefs. Thus, cases of innovative farmers have shown that innovations, information seeking behaviour, experimentation, new technology adoption, enterprise integration, post harvest processing, market intelligence and marketing linkages were the key factors in making these farmers more successful. Therefore more number of such innovative farmers should be involved in the farmer led extension approach.