Sustainable Horticultural Systems

Sustainable horticulture is gaining increasing attention in the field of agriculture as demand for the food production rises to the world community. Sustainable horticultural systems are based on ecological principles to farm, optimizes pest and disease management approaches through environmentally friendly and renewable strategies in production agriculture. It is a discipline that addresses current issues such as food security, water pollution, soil health, pest control, and biodiversity depletion. Novel, environmentally-friendly solutions are proposed based on integrated knowledge from sciences as diverse as agronomy, soil science, entomology, ecology, chemistry and food sciences. Sustainable horticulture interprets methods and processes in the farming system to the global level. For that, horticulturists use the system approach that involves studying components and interactions of a whole system to address scientific, economic and social issues. In that respect, sustainable horticulture is not a classical, narrow science. Instead of solving problems using the classical painkiller approach that treats only negative impacts, sustainable horticulture treats problem sources.

Dr. Dilip Nandwani (born 1965) did his M.Sc. (1987) and Ph.D. (1991) from the University of Jodhpur (now Jai Narayan Vyas University), Jodhpur, India. He joined the Tennessee State University as Associate Professor in 2014. Prior to joining Tennessee State University, he served University of the Virgin Islands (2011-2013) as Research Associate Professor and Program Leader (Horticulture). He worked with Land Grant institutions in the American Pacific for a decade and served as Program Leader in Crop Production and Improvement. Dr. Nandwani has several years of research, extension and education experience in plant and horticultural sciences. He has published 103 articles (peer-reviewed, extension booklets and conference proceedings) in internationally recognized journals. Dr. Nandwani is Certified Professional Horticulturist from American Society for Horticultural Science, worked with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP-GEF) as Regional Advisor, International Agriculture Development and earned five awards, $2.2M grants from regional, national and international organizations, and presented research papers in a two dozen countries.