An ecologically sustainable approach to agricultural production intensification: Global perspectives and developments

The root cause of agricultural land degradation and decreasing productivity–as seen in terms of loss of soil health–is our low soil­carbon farming paradigm of intensive tillage which disrupts and debilitates many important soil­mediated ecosystem functions. For the most part agricultural soils in tillage­based farming without organic surface residue protection are becoming de­structured and compacted, exposed to increased runoff and erosion, and soil life and biodiversity is deprived of habitat and starved of organic matter, leading to decrease in soil’s biological recuperating capacity. Conservation Agriculture (CA) is a cropping system based on no or minimum mechanical soil disturbance, permanent organic mulch soil cover, and crop diversification. It, is an effective solution to stopping agri­ cultural land degradation, for rehabilitation, and for sustainable crop production intensification. CA is now adopted by large and small farmers on some 125 million hectares across all continents and is spreading at an annual rate of about 7 million hectares. Advantages offered by CA to farmers include better livelihood and income, decrease in financial risks, and climate change adaptability and mitigation. For the small manual farmer, CA offers ultimately up to 50% labour saving, less drudgery, stable yields, and improved food security. To the mechanised farmers CA offers lower fuel use and less machinery and maintenance costs, and reduced inputs and cost of production (including labour when CA involves the use of integrated weed management. In pro­poor development programmes, every effort should be made to help producers adopt CA production systems. This is because CA produces more from less, can be adopted and practiced by smallholder poor farmers, builds on the farmer’s own natural resource base, does not entirely depend on purchased derived inputs, and is relatively less costly in the early stages of production intensification.