Abstract:
Increasing the population in developing countries will increase the demand for
food. The human population has changed ecosystems more rapidly and
extensively than in any comparable period in human history, to meet rapidly
increasing demands for food, fresh water, and fuel. To meet the challenges of
demand for food, enhancing agricultural productivity is essential. Therefore,
the usage of chemical fertilizers was increased. Sri Lanka is identified as one
of the nations with higher consumption of chemical fertilizers among the
South Asian countries. Chemical fertilizers dramatically deteriorate the
quality of food, water, soil and air of the particular environment. As a remedy
to those problems ecological green villages program was introduced by the
department of export agriculture of Sri Lanka in 2017, to promote the concept
of organic agriculture. At present, there are about 15 green villages in Sri
Lanka. One such program is being implemented in the Kurunegala district as
the “Indulgodakanda organic crops village” with 41 farmers. The
recommendation of the organic certificate is given only for their organic lands.
Their other lands which are not belonging to the project are cultivated with
chemical fertilizers. The present study aimed compares the impact to
ecosystem services by considering the land belongs to the eco-green village of
Indulgodakanda and chemical agriculture land not belonging to the project.
The Shannon diversity index and the scale of diversity index were used to
achieve the aim. Thereby the diversity of crop species at the beginning of the
project in 2017 and two years after the commencement of the project in 2019
were compared. During the commencement of the project, there was a high
Shannon diversity index value for 26 chemically cultivated lands out of 41
lands. However, 2 years later the Shannon diversity index values were
increased in 33 organic lands. The highest diversity value of the organic
agriculture land was 2.06 while the same chemical agriculture land reveals
1.75. After 2 years alpha diversity of the organic lands were increased up to
10 and 7. However, the beta value was used to study the diversity of crops
between organically and chemically cultivated lands. According to the above
results, this project helped to increase the diversity in organic lands than the
chemically cultivated lands.
