CAAPAS

Sustainable Agriculture and Soil Conservation : report of the "Policy Seminar" of SoCo Project held 28 may 2009 in Brussels by European Commission

Final Report on the project 'Sustainable Agriculture and Soil Conservation (SoCo)'

The spread of Conservation Agriculture: Justification, sustainability and uptake

Amir Kassam, Theodor Friedrich, Francis Shaxson and Jules Pretty 

Conservation Agriculture (CA) has been practised for three decades and has spread widely.We estimate that there are now some 106 million ha of arable and permanent crops grown without tillage in CA systems, corresponding to an annual rate of increase globally since 1990 of 5.3 million ha. Wherever CA has been adopted it appears to have had both agricultural and environmental benefits. Yet CA represents a fundamental change in production system thinking. It has counterintuitive and often unrecognized elements that promote soil health, productive capacity and ecosystem services. The practice of CA thus requires a deeper understanding of its ecological underpinnings in order to manage its various elements for sustainable intensification, where the aim is to optimize resource use and protect or enhance ecosystem processes in space and time over the long term. For these reasons CA is knowledge-intensive. CA constitutes principles and practices that can make a major contribution to sustainable production intensification. This, the first of two papers, presents them justification for CA as a system capable of building sustainability into agricultural production systems. It discusses some of CA’s major achievable benefits, and presents an overview of the uptake of CA worldwide to 2009. The related paper elaborates the necessary conditions for the spread of CA.

Keywords: Conservation Agriculture, conservation tillage, no-till, soil health, sustainability, technology adoption, tillage practices

Development and Current Status of No-till Adoption in the World

Rolf Derpsch & Theodor Friedrich

In 1999 no-tillage, synonymous of zero tillage, was adopted on about 45 million ha world wide

(Derpsch, 2001), growing to 72 million ha in 2003 (Benites, et al., 2003) and to 105 million ha in

2009. Fastest adoption rates have been experienced in South America where some countries are using no-tillage on about 70% of the total cultivated area. Opposite to countries like the USA where often fields under no-tillage are tilled every now and then, more than two thirds of no-tillage practiced in South America is permanently under this system, in other words once started, the soil is never tilled again. The adoption of no-tillage on more than 105 million ha shows the great adaptability of the system to all kinds of climates, soils and cropping conditions. No-tillage is now being practiced from the artic circle over the tropics to about 50º latitude south, from sea level to 3000 m altitude, from extremely rainy areas with 2500 mm a year to extremely dry conditions with 250 mm a year. The wide recognition as a truly sustainable farming system should ensure the growth of this technology to areas where adoption is still low as soon as the barriers for its adoption have been overcome. The widespread adoption also shows that no-tillage can not any more be considered a temporary fashion, instead the system has established itself as a technology that can no longer be ignored by scientists, universities, extension workers, farmers as well as machine manufacturers and politicians.

Key words: World wide no-till adoption / zero tillage adoption / conservation agriculture adoption