An Indian village agricultural ecosystem-case study of Ungra village, Part II: Discussion

The observations reported in Part I of this paper are discussed in detail here. It has been argued that the agricultural village of Ungra is an open, dependent, land-humans-livestock ecosystem. Simple expressions have been derived for the carrying capacity of the ecosystem with respect to cereal crops, the pasture land-crop land ratio, the number of draught animal pairs, the human to draught-animal pair ratio and the human to cattle ratio. The agreement between the calculated and observed parameters has been taken as evidence that there is a rationale underlying the ecosystem. The energy aspects of the ecosystem, in particular draught power, and cooking fuel, have been discussed in terms of enhancing the productivity and/or self-sufficiency of the ecosystem. Some of the important limitations of the study have been identified in order to indicate the directions of recent work. It has been concluded that an understanding of the logic of village agricultural ecosystems should be the basis of rural development.