Why Conservation Agriculture?

Conservation Agriculture (CA) is an agro-ecological approach to farming which addresses the problems and weaknesses in conventional tillage agriculture as described in the problem section of this website.

Avoiding or minimizing soil disturbance, protecting the soil surface with mulch which also serves as substrate for soil life, and cropping system diversification, CA provides an ecological foundation to cropping systems upon which to build sustainable agricultural production and land management strategies at the farm and landscape levels. Global scientific literature, including from Europe, shows that such strategies are capable of mobilizing greater crop, livestock and land potentials of agricultural production systems while simultaneously facilitating the flow of ecosystem services such as the availability of clean water, carbon sequestration, control of runoff and soil erosion, pollination services, and water, nutrient and carbon cycling.

Further, it is increasingly becoming clear that CA production systems offer greater factor productivity and profit, as well as greater overall efficiencies and have enhanced resilience to biotic and abiotic stresses compared with conventional tillage production systems. In fact, CA is also considered to be climate-smart from an adaptation as well as mitigation viewpoint.

CA strives to achieve high and sustained production levels with minimum purchased inputs while conserving natural resources. More importantly, CA is a regenerative system of farming in which any soil or land degradation caused as a result of farm operations is less than the inherent recovery capacity. Where land has become degraded and eroded, CA has the capacity to rebuild and rehabilitate the top soil and restore soil-mediated ecosystem functions and services.

Given these productivity, economic, environmental and social advantages and benefits, the uptake and spread of CA annual cropping systems has been increasing at the rate of some 10 million hectares per annum since 2008/09. In 2013/14, CA was spread across some 160 million hectares of annual cropland. In the UK, CA area has increased from 150,000 hectares of arable land in 2011 to 362,000 hectares in 2016 (8% of UK’s total arable land area).

CA is most definitely not a quick-fix solution to agricultural development, nor does it offer silver bullet solution to overcome all constraints, and it is certainly not a panacea solution to all agricultural problems. However, CA does offer an alternative approach to underpin crop and agricultural production systems (including with trees and livestock) ecologically so that they are profitable, sustainable and resource enhancing and conserving, offering a fuller set of on-farm benefits and landscape-level societal services.