Cultivation of medicinal plants especially high value medicinal plants is creating new dimension in the field of agriculture. The Medicinal Plant Industry puts together the various facets of this multi-disciplinary industry and its global interest. The need for developing countries to acquire technologies and techniques for programmed cultivation of medicinal plants is a current issue. Various aspects of medicinal plant cultivation includes old philosophies, modern impact of traditional medicines, and methods of assessing the spontaneous flora for industrial utilization, climatic variations, biological assessment, formulation, process technologies, phytochemical research and information sources.
There is a need for a scientific approach for propagation of medicinal plants and to collect relevant information regarding agrotechnology, genuine planting material, economics of field cultivation, high yielding varieties etc. One has to explore wild medicinal plant species and to bring them under cultivation. Sometimes plants selected from the wild population may be suitable for the cultivation and there is no immediate necessity for any improvement programs in it.
Scientific cropping of industrially important medicinal plant is an integrated approach with agricultural and forestry with optimum land and water resources utilization. In India, various medicinal plants are cultivated and domesticated, therefore, International trade is looking to procure medicinal plant materials from India for the production of pharmaceutical, nutraceutical and cosmeticeutical preparations. India is also making efforts for cultivation, collection, characterization, planned hybridization programs for improvement of the plant species, and conservation medicinal plants restoring their genetic resources, etc for commercial cultivation. Plant the breeders of medicinal plant play key role in improvement of medicinal plants because he cares for stable produce, uniform plant growth and maturity, economic to grow and of good quality.
The purpose of the present book to gives overall information about general cultivation practices of medicinal plants. Individual plant has also been discussed with its cultivation techniques. Procedure for getting financial aids through various financial agencies has also been mentioned. |
