---

ABSTRACT

Natural resources, biodiversity, and labour are all conserved through conservation agriculture. It promotes soil water availability, reduces heat and drought stress, and improves soil health over time. Conservation agriculture (CA) plays a significant role as a more sustainable cultivation strategy for the future, retaining and saving future production resources for sustainable crop production through minimal soil disturbance (no-till, NT) and permanent soil cover (mulch) linked with rotations. Conservation agriculture (CA) is a more environmentally friendly and sustainable crop management approach that raised soil microbial population, which is a direct influence of soil fertility, thus we can conclude that conservation agriculture boosted soil fertility for long-term crop production. In order to fulfil expanding population demands, agriculture in the next decade will have to sustainably produce more food from less land through more effective use of natural resources and with little environmental damage. This goal can be met by promoting and implementing CA management solutions.

Keywords: Conservation agriculture (CA), crop residue, natural resource, no-till, fertility

 

The world population is expected to increase from 7.7 billion in 2019 to 9.7 billion in 2050 (United Nations, 2019). As a result, in order to meet the world`s food demand, agricultural systems around the world must change to produce more food in a more sustainable manner.

Conservation agriculture (CA) has been explained as an agricultural system capable of attaining the sustainable intensification required to meet world food demand, notwithstanding its limitations (Kassam et al., 2009). Conservation agriculture (CA) is defined as minimal soil disturbance (no-till, NT) combined with permanent soil cover (that leaves at least 30% of the soil covered between harvest and planting) and diversified crop species that include legumes (FAO, 2017, Burdhan et al., 2020). In agriculture, cultivation and tillage are essential. Before introducing conservation tillage (CT), a practise that arose from the American dust bowl of the 1930s, the advantages of tillage in agriculture are investigated. The benefits of CA, a suggested improvement on CT, are described next, where NT, mulch, and rotations considerably increase soil characteristics and other biotic variables. Case crop studies from the rice-wheat areas of South Asia`s Indo-Gangetic Plains and Northwest Mexico`s irrigated maize-wheat systems are used to show how CA methods have been applied to increase production sustainably and profitably in these two ecosystems. The advantages of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and their impact on global warming are also explored (Hobbs et al., 2008).

Role of conservation Agriculture in sustainability: With regionally modified approaches, CA concepts are generally applicable to all agricultural landscapes and land uses. External inputs such as agrochemicals and plant nutrients of mineral or organic origin are delivered optimally and in ways and quantities that do not interfere with or disrupt biological processes, and soil interventions such as mechanical soil disturbance are kept to a bare minimum or avoided. CA increases overall land husbandry for rainfed and irrigated crops by facilitating good agronomy, such as timely operations. Other well-known good practises, including as the use of high-quality seeds and integrated pest, nutrient, weed, and water management, are also recommended and CA is a base for sustainable agricultural production intensification.

 Principles of conservation agriculture

1.     Minimum mechanical soil disturbance

Only the soil where the seed, fertiliser, and manure will be applied should be disturbed.

• does not expose soil to wind and water erosion;

• improves water infiltration rates;

• slows the rate at which organic matter is mineralized and oxidised, resulting in organic matter build-up;

• causes little disruption to soil organisms.

• saves time, energy, and money because less land is tilled.

 

 2.     Permanent soil organic cover

• reduces runoff and allows water to seep into the soil;

• reduces evaporation and thus conserves moisture for the crop;

• suppresses weed emergence;

• organic residues improve organic matter content and soil nutrient status;

• provides a beneficial environment for soil organisms such as worms and millipedes that are beneficial to the crop.

 

 3.     Crop rotation

•Timely Operations

•Precise Operations

•Efficient Use of Inputs

 

Benefits of Conservation Agriculture

a.     Improves Yields.

b.     Reduces Production Cost.

c.     Overcomes shortages of labour and farm power.

Equipment’s for conservation agriculture: There are some outstanding assessments of the zero-tillage equipment requirements. A technique to handle loose straw (cutting or moving aside), seed and fertilizer placement, furrow closing, and seed/soil compaction are the key equipment requirements in a Conservation agriculture system. Small-scale farmers must also adapt direct-drill seeding equipment to manual, animal, or small tractor power sources (reduced weight and draught requirements) and reduce costs so that the equipment is affordable to them, though the use of rental and service providers allows small-scale farmers to use this system even if they do not own a tractor or a seeder.

Bolivian small-scale animal-powered farmers have built a simple three-row tiny grain seeder. To conserve weight, this machine employs a shovel instead of a disc opener. Straw wheels are added to the coulter to assist in moving leftovers aside and preventing blockage. It also has the advantage of being able to be employed in both ploughed and unplugged soil. Farmers noted that the biggest advantage of this drill was the time savings; it takes 10 hours to plant a hectare with this machinery and 12 days to plant a hectare with the Transplanting and Seeding method.

New machines deliver precise seed distribution through constant soil penetration and depth, as well as fertilizer in bands, which is critical for minimizing nutrient losses in zero-till systems (Wang et al., 2018).

Climate Change and Need of Conservation Agriculture: Climate change is expected to have a significant impact on rice–wheat, rice–rice, and maize–based cropping systems, which currently account for more than 80% of total cereals grown on more than 100 Mha^-1 of agricultural land in South Asia. Global warming may be advantageous in some areas but dangerous in others where ideal temperatures already exist; for example, the rice–wheat mega-environments in the Indo Gangetic Plains (IGP), which account for 15% of global wheat production, are an example. By minimizing tillage and residue burning and boosting nitrogen usage efficiency, agronomic and crop management strategies must seek to reduce CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions.

In the IGP, resource-conserving methods are expanding in rice–wheat cropping systems, saving 50–60 l of diesel per haK¹ plus labor, and reducing CO₂ emissions significantly. In puddled anaerobic paddy fields and when residues are burned, methane emissions with a warming potential 21 times that of CO2 are prevalent and important. By switching to an aerobic, direct seeded, or Non transplanted (NT) rice system, this GHG output can be reduced. The warming potential of nitrous oxide is 310 times that of carbon dioxide, and its emissions are influenced by inadequate nitrogen management. In Eastern-IGP, drought are major climatic constraints and delayed sowing of crops leads to economic losses to farming society. Climate Smart Agriculture based technologies like CA are one of the option with strong base to mitigate the ill effects of changing climate (Tamta et al., 2020).  In Mexico and South Asia, sensor-based systems for detecting normalized differential vegetative index and moisture index have been employed to increase nitrogen application efficiency and reduce nitrous oxide emissions (Wang et al., 2018).

  Conclusions

Conservation agriculture play significant role in sustainable crop production. Conservation agriculture enhance the soil microbial activity through recycling of  crop straw, minimum soil disturbance and cover the soil throughout the growing season. These practices directly effect on soil physical, chemical as well as biological properties and play significant role in sustainable crop production.

 Reference

FAO (2017). https://www.fao.org/3/i7480e/i7480e.pdf

Hobbs, P.R., Sayre, K. and Gupta, R., 2008. The role of conservation agriculture in sustainable agriculture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363(1491), pp.543-555.

Kassam, A., Friedrich, T., Shaxson, F., and Pretty, J. (2009). The spread of Conservation Agriculture: justification, sustainability and uptake. Inter. J. Agr. Sust. 7, 292–320. doi: 10.3763/ijas.2009.0477

Ndah, H.T., (2014). Adoption and adaptation of innovations. Available at https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/17674/ndah.pdf?sequence=1.

Wang, J., Vanga, S.K., Saxena, R., Orsat, V. and Raghavan, V., (2018). Effect of climate change on the yield of cereal crops: a review. Climate, 6(2), p.41.

Bardhan, T., Dey, A., & Bhardwaj, N. (2020). Conservation Agriculture: A silver bullet for sustainable agricultural development in twenty first century. Food and Scientific Reports. 1 (4): 59-63.

Tamta, M., Shubha, K., Kumar, S., Dubey, A. K., Kumar, R., & Mukherjee, A. (2020) Overview of Changing Climate and Need of Climate Smart Technologies to Sustain Agriculture in E-IGP. Food and Scientific Reports. 1 (1): 15-19.

 

Get the full article PDF to your mail, Click the link 

 

Keep Reading Keep Learning

 

 

---

6. Role of conservation agriculture for sustainable crop production_compressed.pdf