Principles, Positives and Limitations of Conservation Agriculture: A Review

Abstract

Lessons learnt from past experiences push for an alternate way of crop production. One such is Conservation agriculture (CA), which can be seen as a new way forward for conserving resources and enhancing productivity to achieve goals of sustainable agriculture. In recent past, progressive and significant efforts are made to develop, refine and disseminate conservation-based agricultural technologies across globe. Tremendous efforts on zero-till practices and surface management with crop residues for crop production were reviewed. This work was done at Department of Agronomy, Agricultural College and Research Institute, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Madurai -625 104, Tamil Nadu, India. A systematic cum integrative review of research work done in different parts of World, particularly in India was comprehended. Literature search was done during 2020. About 200 review and research papers were screened from various databases like TNAU e-library, ARCC journals, Google Scholar, Research gate and Scopus and 84 papers were used. This review article comprehensively documents major principles of CA along with extent and spread of CA across the globe. It also highlights CA in Indian perspective. Various merits and demerits were also discussed with literature support. This review paper discusses rising concerns of conventional agriculture systems with regard to its adoption, positives and negatives of conservation agriculture in promoting conservation agriculture in tropics.

Strategic Tillage for Sustaining the Productivity of Broadacre Cropping in the Arid and Semi-Arid Regions of Southern Australia

“…However, the disadvantages of CT practices include the breaking of soil structure, which might lead to an increase in soil dispersion [1], wind and water erosion [2,3], loss of conserved soil moisture [3,4] and reducing soil organic carbon content [5] depending on the depth of tillage.…”

“…CA is not a new concept, and it was first conceptualised to protect the soil by the farming community and scientists in the 1930s after the 'dustbowls' incident during a drought in the mid-west of the USA due to extensive cultivation. However, the CA only became more popular with the development of the improved seeding machinery in the late 1940s [5] and the widespread use of herbicides in 1960s in USA [7]. Currently, 12.5% of agricultural lands under the CA practices around the globe, and Australia has adopted CA practices at a wider scale than any other country [8][9][10].…”

Conservation agriculture practices: Impact on productivity, energy utilisation and profitability of onion-based cropping system

“…Conservation agriculture (CA), an agricultural production system with optimum inputs, high returns and sustainability while conserving environment is primarily required for command areas and rainfed uplands. CA helps to improve and conserve soil health through crop rotation, mulching, minimum field traffic and mechanical soil disturbance and conserve water to achieve economically and ecologically sustainable crop production (Swaminathan et al, 2021; Selvakumar and Sivakumar, 2021) [11,9] . Allium has almost 500 species in the 57 genera of angiosperms and largest genus in the Amaryllidaceae.…”