Role of Earthworms for Sustainable Agriculture: A Review

Earthworms are the most commonly occur in the soil. The activities of burrowing and feeding by earthworms have many valuable effects generally on soil quality for crop production. Earthworms act as the soil conditioners by improving the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the soil. By the processes like fragmentation, aeration, breakdown of organic matter in soil helps in the release nutrients and makes them available to plants also secretes the plant growth hormones, their crucial role in nitrogen fixation, carbon dynamics, and phosphorous dynamics. Due to the rapidly improved farm machineries and increased use of synthetic fertilizers causing the huge decline in the population of the earthworms. Due to rapid industrialization and the rise of population brought a lot of change in land use, made the land inappropriate for the development and growth of earthworms. An effort was made to explain the factors affecting the population of the earthworms, effective earthworm friendly agricultural practices which improves the population dynamics of earthworms, thus improve the soil productivity and crop productivity