S–Z
Sandy soil
Light, gritty soil that water runs straight through. It is easy to plough and warms up early, but it dries out fast and nutrients leach away, so it needs frequent light irrigation and plenty of manure.
Related guides →Scouting
Walking the field once or twice a week and deliberately checking leaf undersides, growing tips and any wilting plants, then noting what you find. Without this habit no pest threshold can be judged and every spray becomes a guess.
Related guides →Seed saving
Keeping seed from your own healthy, true-to-type plants for the next season, after proper cleaning and drying. It works for desi and open-pollinated varieties, not for hybrids.
Related guides →Seed treatment
Coating seed with a fungicide, insecticide or bio-agent before sowing to protect the young seedling from soil-borne disease and early pests. It is one of the cheapest protections per rupee spent in the whole season.
Related guides →Shelterbelt
Rows of trees or tall shrubs planted along a field boundary to break the wind. It cuts moisture loss, protects flowering and standing crops from wind damage, and holds loose topsoil in place.
Related guides →Silage
Green fodder such as maize chopped and packed airtight in a pit or bag, where it ferments and keeps for months. It lets you carry the surplus of the green season into the hot months when nothing green is left.
Related guides →Silvopasture
Grazing livestock among trees on purpose, so one piece of land gives fodder, shade, fruit or timber together. The shade cuts heat stress on animals and the dung feeds the trees.
Related guides →Soil compaction
A hard layer formed when tractors, cattle or repeated ploughing at one depth press the soil tight. Roots cannot push through it and rainwater stands on top instead of soaking in.
Related guides →Soil erosion
The washing or blowing away of the topsoil, which is the most fertile layer you have. Bare fields on a slope lose it fastest, and once gone it takes many years of manuring to build back.
Related guides →Soil Health Card
A government-issued report of your field's nutrient status with a crop-wise fertiliser recommendation, so you stop guessing doses. Sampling cycles and how you apply differ by state, so ask your local agriculture office or KVK.
Related guides →Soil microbiome
The whole living population of a soil — bacteria, fungi, protozoa and more — that breaks down organic matter and hands nutrients to roots in a form plants can take. Feed it organic matter and it feeds the crop.
Related guides →Soil pH
A measure of whether your soil is acidic, neutral or alkaline, on a scale of 0 to 14. Most crops feed best near neutral; when pH drifts too far either way, nutrients stay locked in the soil even after you apply fertiliser.
Related guides →Soil testing
Sending a properly drawn soil sample to a lab to find out what your field is actually short of. It is the only honest way to decide fertiliser quantities instead of copying what the neighbour does.
Related guides →Soil texture
How coarse or fine your soil feels, decided by the mix of sand, silt and clay in it. Texture is what governs how fast your field drains, how long it holds moisture and how easily it works.
Related guides →Soybean
A kharif oilseed-cum-pulse legume, biggest in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Being a legume it fixes nitrogen and leaves the field better for the following rabi crop.
Related guides →Sprinkler irrigation
Water thrown over the crop like rain through nozzles on pipes. It suits close-sown crops such as wheat and groundnut and uneven land, but wind blows the spray away and wet leaves can invite fungal disease.
Related guides →Sticky trap
A coloured card coated with glue, hung in the crop to catch small flying pests. Yellow cards catch whitefly and aphids; blue cards work better for thrips. Their main value is telling you numbers are rising before damage shows.
Related guides →Sugarcane
A 10 to 18 month cash crop called ganna, harvested and then often kept for a ratoon crop from the same roots. Mill payment cycles matter as much to your cash flow as the tonnage does.
Related guides →Sun trap
Land shaped into a warm pocket — a wall or hedge blocking cold wind while the ground catches winter sun. No glass, no power, yet it can run 5 to 10°C above the open field beside it.
Related guides →Swale
A shallow, level trench dug across a slope with the soil piled on the lower side, so runoff stops and soaks in instead of racing downhill. Close cousin of the contour bund many Indian farmers already build.
Related guides →Systemic pesticide
A product the plant takes up and carries in its sap, so it also reaches hidden sap-suckers and borers that a surface spray never touches. It stays active inside the plant for longer, which is why its pre-harvest interval matters most.
Related guides →Termite
Pale, soft-bodied, ant-like insects that travel inside mud tubes and stay hidden, so the first sign is a plant wilting or toppling with no visible cause — pull it and the roots or lower stem are hollowed out. Worst in dry, stressed fields.
Related guides →Terra preta
The black, charcoal-rich soil Amazon farmers built two thousand years ago, still far more fertile than the red clay around it. Biochar plus organic waste plus minerals — a recipe any farmer with crop residue can copy.
Related guides →Terrace gardening
Growing vegetables and fruit on a rooftop or terrace in pots, grow bags or raised beds. Load on the slab, waterproofing and summer heat are the things to plan for before you plant.
Related guides →Thrips
Extremely small (about 1 mm), slender, fast-moving insects best found by tapping a flower over white paper. Their scraping leaves silvery-bronze streaks and curled, distorted new growth, and they spread destructive viruses in chilli, onion, cotton and groundnut.
Related guides →Tissue culture
Raising planting material in a lab from a few cells, so every plant is identical and free of the viruses that build up in suckers. Standard now for banana, where it gives uniform stands and a shorter, more even harvest.
Related guides →Tomato
A short-duration vegetable grown almost year round from a raised nursery, then transplanted. Prices swing sharply, so staggered planting protects you better than one big planting.
Related guides →Topdressing
Giving fertiliser on the standing crop after sowing, usually nitrogen, timed with tillering, branching or flowering. Splitting nitrogen this way wastes far less than dumping it all at sowing.
Related guides →Transition period (organic)
The stretch after you stop using chemical inputs during which the land is managed organically but the produce cannot yet be sold as certified organic. Its length depends on the standard and the crop, so confirm the current requirement with your certification body.
Related guides →Trap crop
A crop sown alongside the main one because the pest prefers it, drawing egg-laying away from your cash crop so you can treat a small area instead of the whole field — marigold with tomato and castor with groundnut are common examples.
Related guides →Tree fodder
Leaves and tender shoots of trees like subabul, neem, moringa and mulberry, cut and fed to livestock. It carries good protein and stays green through summer when grass has dried off.
Related guides →Trench composting
Burying kitchen and garden waste straight into a trench in the bed instead of building a heap. No turning, no smell, no separate bin — the soil and worms finish the job where the roots will find it.
Related guides →Trichogramma Wasp
A wasp under a millimetre long that lays its egg inside a pest egg, killing it before it hatches. You notice its work rather than the insect — bollworm or stem borer eggs turned black. Released on paper Trichocards in cotton, sugarcane and maize.
Related guides →Tur (arhar / pigeon pea)
A long-duration kharif pulse, the dal on most Indian plates, that tolerates dry spells well. It fixes nitrogen and is often intercropped with cotton, soybean or groundnut.
Related guides →Turmeric
Haldi, a rhizome spice crop of about eight to nine months that needs boiling, drying and polishing before sale. Most of the extra money is in doing that processing yourself.
Related guides →Urea
The cheapest and most common nitrogen fertiliser in India, supplying only nitrogen. It works fast but leaches away quickly, so it is usually split across the crop's growth stages rather than given all at once.
Related guides →Vermicompost
Compost made by feeding cow dung and crop waste to earthworms, which leave behind a fine, nutrient-rich casting. It is richer and quicker-acting than ordinary compost and many farmers sell the surplus.
Related guides →Waffle garden
Small planting basins sunk into the ground, each ringed by a raised mud wall, so rain or hand-carried water stays right over the roots and wind cannot dry them. A Zuni desert method that fits dry districts of India.
Related guides →Walipini
An underground greenhouse: a pit dug a few feet down with a clear sloping roof, so the steady warmth of the earth plus trapped sun keeps crops going through winter without fuel. Suits cold high-altitude areas like Ladakh, not the hot plains.
Related guides →Water table
The level below ground at which the soil is saturated with water, and the depth your borewell or well must reach. It rises after good rain and falls when more is pumped out than goes back in.
Related guides →Waterlogging
Water standing in the field long enough to drive the air out of the soil, so roots suffocate and rot. Leaves yellow from the bottom up and the crop simply stops growing until the water drains.
Related guides →Weed tea
A liquid feed made by fermenting fast-growing weeds with jaggery — known in Korean Natural Farming as Fermented Plant Juice. It draws out growth hormones, enzymes and minerals from plants already growing free on the bund.
Related guides →Wheat
The main rabi cereal, called gehu, sown after the monsoon crop is off the field. Sowing on time matters most: late sowing runs into February heat and shrivels the grain.
Related guides →Wheat Rust
A fungal disease of wheat showing small raised orange-yellow pustules that rub off as rust-coloured powder on your fingers — in narrow stripes along veins for yellow rust, scattered for brown rust. Its spores travel long distances on wind.
Related guides →Whitefly (Safed Makkhi)
Tiny moth-like white insects that rise in a visible cloud when the plant is shaken, with flat scale-like nymphs stuck to leaf undersides. Their real damage is transmitting leaf curl viruses to cotton, tomato, chilli and cucurbits — a disease with no cure.
Related guides →Wood ash
The grey powder left after burning wood, rich in potash and lime. Used in small, measured doses it feeds soil and compost for free — but it is strongly alkaline, so spreading it carelessly can do real harm.
Related guides →Worm tower
A perforated pipe or bucket sunk upright in a bed, fed with kitchen scraps. Composting worms work inside it and carry their castings out into the surrounding soil, right where the roots are. One tower serves roughly 3 to 4 square metres.
Related guides →Yellow Stem Borer
A pale yellow caterpillar that bores inside the rice stem, so it is rarely seen. It is known by two symptoms instead: dead heart, where the central shoot of a young plant dries and pulls out easily, and white ear, where the panicle turns white and sets no grain.
Related guides →Yield per acre
Produce harvested from one acre, the unit most Indian farmers actually think in. To compare it with an official per-hectare figure, remember 1 hectare = 2.47105 acres, so multiply your per-acre yield by 2.47105 to get the per-hectare figure.
Related guides →Yield per hectare
Produce harvested from one hectare, the unit used in government data, research trials and subsidy ceilings. Since 1 hectare = 2.47105 acres, divide a per-hectare figure by 2.47105 to get the comparable per-acre yield.
Related guides →Zaid
The short summer season between rabi harvest and the monsoon, roughly March to June, used for melons, cucumber, moong and fodder. It is fully irrigation-dependent, so only take it where water is assured.
Related guides →