© 2016 PP House Dairy Based Farming: Economic Analysis for Viable Livelihood Opportunity for Jhum Practcing Tribal People of Mizoram State Lalrin Sangpuii * and Ravinder Malhotra Division of Dairy Economics, Statistics & Management, National Dairy Research Institute, Karnal, Haryana (132 001), India Abstract Jhum cultivation in North Eastern Region of India is traditionally practiced by local tribes. This practice accounts almost 84% of total shifting cultivation area of India. Of late, this system becomes a serious threat to the livelihoods opportunity and environmental security in the region. Keeping this in view, the present study was conducted to explore the contribution of crops towards income generation both under Jhum condition and integrated crops-cattle farming condition in three districts of Mizoram in the year 2014–15. Usual farm management techniques were applied to assess the proftability. Cost of crop cultivation in Jhum was estimated to be ` 23778 ha -1 while in case of integrated farming it was worked out to be ` 38886 ha -1 . The income generated from crop under dairy-based farming (` 41906 ha -1 ) was found to be much higher than the income obtained from crops in Jhum farming (` 23581 ha -1 ) implying that dairy-based farming was more proftable compared to Jhum farming. Jhum could be proftable if family labour engagement was the practice. The ha -1 cost of cattle maintenance was found to be ` 66711 while the gross return was estimated to be ` 72332. The B-C ratio for dairy-based farm was found to be more than 1(one) indicating the proftability of this type of farming. In addition, the integrated crops- cattle farming had higher potentiality to afford farm employment. It is, thus, suggested to provide necessary support to make this system more adopted by the tribal people of Mizoram for its economic viability. Article History Correspondence to Keywords Manuscript No. AR1538b Received in 15 th February, 2016 Received in revised form 29 th May, 2016 Accepted in fnal form 6 th June, 2016 * E-mail: mapuiibh@yahoo.com Jhum cultivation, dairy-based farming, farm effciency, employment potential 1. Introduction Jhum cultivation or shifting cultivation is a dominant land- use practice of North-Eastern Region (NER) of India and is mostly practiced in the tribal dominated hilly areas. The people involved in this practice are known as ‘Jhumiyas’ (Choudhury, 2004). In this type of cultivation, the forest area is cleaned, burnt and a variety of crops are cultivated in the slope of the hills. Once the productivity of the Jhum is reduced, the land is abandoned and new area is prepared for cultivation. The population explosion and increased demand for cultivable land have resulted in reduction of Jhum cultivation cycle. The Jhum cycle in most areas, which used to be 10−15 years earlier is now reducing to 2−3 years only (Tripathi and Barik, 2003). This leads to severe soil loss due to erosion, deforestation causing serious environmental degradation and ecological imbalance (Satapathy and Bujarbaruah, 2006). Area under shifting cultivation in the entire NER is around 1.99 mha which occupies 5.51% of the total geographical area. This accounts nearly 83.73% of the total area under shifting cultivation in India (Patel et al., 2013; Mandal, 2011). The rate of land degradation stands at 34.7% which is almost two fold more than the national average of 20.2% (Patel et al., 2013). Mizoram is also known for its shifting cultivation and it affects 8.98% of the total geographical area of the State. Jhum cultivation is practised in 40089 ha of land which accounts about 38.64% of net sown area (GoM, 2013). In this context, organic farming system is looked upon as one of the means to remedy these problems (Kumaresan et al., 2008). Besides, the milk and meat from the dairy industry are very popular and the demand for manure is constantly increasing. As a matter of fact, the State has been declared as Organic State. So in order to promote “settled cultivation” in place of “shifting cultivation”, livestock rearing, especially dairying could play a very important role for manure of cattle is also used to enrich the soil fertility. Further, cow, buffaloes, poultry, goats and pigs are not only the source of organic manures but it also provides additional income to the farming community in general and resource in particular (Kumaresan et al., 2009). In view of above, the present study aims to analyze costs, returns and employment opportunity from both the systems 480 International Journal of Bio-resource and Stress Management 2016, 7(3):480-484 Short Research Article DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.23910/IJBSM/2016.7.3.1538b