With an increasing population, world agriculture is facing many challenges, such as climate change, urbanization, the use of natural resources in a sustainable manner, runoff losses, and the accumulation of pesticides and fertilizers. The global water shortage is a crisis for agriculture, because drought is one of the natural disasters that affect the farmers as well as their country’s social, economic, and environmental status. The application of soil amendments is a strategy to mitigate the adverse impact of drought stress. The development of agronomic strategies enabling the reduction in drought stress in cultivated crops is, therefore, a crucial priority. Superabsorbent polymers (SAPs) can be used as an amendment for soil health improvement, ultimately improving water holding capacity and plant available water. These are eco-friendly and non-toxic materials, which have incredible water absorption ability and water holding capacity in the soil because of their unique biochemical and structural properties. Polymers can retain water more than their weight in water and achieve approximately 95% water release. SAP improve the soil like porosity (0.26–6.91%), water holding capacity (5.68–17.90%), and reduce nitrogen leaching losses from soil by up to 45%. This review focuses on the economic assessment of the adoption of superabsorbent polymers and brings out the discrepancies associated with the influence of SAPs application in the context of different textured soil, presence of drought, and their adoption by farmers.

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Modern farming requires sustainable use of soil resources because soil quality can easily be deteriorated within a short period of time. For sustainable agricultural productivity, it is utmost important to improve and maintain soil physical, chemical and biological health. The micro biodiversity plays a crucial role in ensuring the availability of inherent and applied nutrients in the soil to the crop plants. The characterization of physical, chemical and microbiological properties of soil in relation to organic cultivation is important for recommending the nutrient and water input for optimum plant growth. The sustainability of World’s agriculture is threatened by sharp declining factor productivity due to deteriorating soil quality, imbalanced use of fertilizers, mismatch between nutrient additions and removal and escalating cost of production. Despite the reduced potential of agro-ecosystems, organic cultivation can contribute to build up, or at least maintain, soil nutrient reserves whilst at the same time maximizing nutrient recycling and reducing external inputs. Organic farming is a system of crop production, which primarily aims to keep soil alive and in good health using organic based nutrient inputs like compost, farm yard manure, green manure, vermicompost, bone meal and crop residues etc.

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The present investigation was carried out to assess the soil nutrient status under five year old popular plantation. In the study, five barley varieties (BH 946, BH 959, BH 393, BH 885 and BH 902) were sown with already established poplar plantation at a 5 x 3 m spacing. Soil pH and EC decreased significantly under poplar plantation than sole barley crop. A significant increase in soil organic carbon, available nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium were observed at all depths (0-15, 15- 30 and 30-45 cm) under poplar based agroforestry system than sole barley (devoid of trees). Poplar based agroforestry system was observed to provide exemplary effect on soil properties as compared to sole cropping. Thus, signifying that poplar based agroforestry system will also yield good returns to farmers in the long-run by improving the soil health and agricultural sustainability.