organic farming: opportunities and challenges in sundarbazar, lamjung, nepal

Organic farming is growing concern to nepalese societies, however there were limited studies regarding this in nepal. thus, this research was objectively conducted to assess organic farming practice and employment opportunities, compare the income generated from organic and inorganic products and identify problems faced by farmers. sundarbazar of lamjung district nepal was selected as study site. total 50 farmers were selected for questionnaire survey, 30 key informants interview were conducted and market survey and observation were employed in april and may, 2019 and collected data were analyzed. results showed that, total 137 and 99 employments were created through organic farming and inorganic farming respectively. statistically t-test and levene’s test did not show significance difference in employment generation by organic and inorganic farmers at 95% confidence level. however, one-way anova and tukey’s b tests showed that there was significance difference in employment generation from organic farming among rich, medium and poor farmers. farmers were used extracts of allium sativum (garlic) and azadirachtaindica (neem) and ash to control pests in organic farming. the highest difference was us $ 0.18 recorded price of cucumber produced by organic and inorganic farmers. interestingly, it was quite higher earnings of farmers applying organic farming than inorganic farming. specifically, rich farmers applying organic and inorganic farming were earning annually us$ 8677.54 and 2603.26 respectively. principle component analysis showed that low production in initial year was the highest challenging issues for farmer to continue the practice of organic farming but low irrigation facility was of inorganic farming.