Abstract
Adoption of best soil and water management practices is desirable for sustainable production intensification. However, farmers have difficulties in adopting them within a system approach to management, missing out on positive results for themselves and for society. A partnership between the Brazilian No-Till Farmers Federation and Itaipu Binacional authority adopted a participatory management strategy, as proposed by the National Water Resources Policy, allowing important decisions regarding the use of water to be made in participatory Watershed Committees, to address such farmers’ difficulties. In this paper, we review the development and application of the Participatory Quality Index approach based on the principles of conservation agriculture to improve the quality of no-till systems in the Paraná 3 watershed within the Cultivating Good Water program. We analyze the available documentation and experiences of the program’s executors, highlighting the results from the perspective of sustainability of multiple uses of water in a watershed.
Highlights
No-till farming as an approach for managing crops and production systems has its roots in the first half of the 20th century when in 1943 Edward Faulkner stated that there was no scientific reason to plow the soil [1]
In the studies on machinery developed for direct seeding in 1973 and later [1,2,3], it was highlighted that from experiments conducted at the Rothamsted Experimental Station, England, in the second half of the 1940s, soil preparation was considered dispensable, as long as there was no competition by weeds
The pioneering record in Brazil belongs to the farmer Herbert Bartz who, after learning about the first experiences of the pioneer producer Harry Young in the United States, imported a machine with tools capable of carrying out direct seeding into untilled soil
Summary
No-till farming as an approach for managing crops and production systems has its roots in the first half of the 20th century when in 1943 Edward Faulkner stated that there was no scientific reason to plow the soil [1]. The pioneering record in Brazil belongs to the farmer Herbert Bartz who, after learning about the first experiences of the pioneer producer Harry Young in the United States, imported a machine with tools capable of carrying out direct seeding into untilled soil. In October 1972, the first sowing with a machine was carried out with tools capable of direct seeding of what came to be known in Brazil as direct planting in straw [5] These experiences were copied and replicated in the most diverse regions in Southern Brazil, as the concern of most technicians and sectorial policies at the time was the increase in erosion processes resulting from soil preparation with intensive tillage in the heavy tropical rainfall environment. The contribution is aligned to the implementation of the National Water Resources Policy in Brazil because it provides relevant criteria and directives for water use management, allowing important decisions to be made in the Watershed Committees regarding the management and use of water in agricultural land
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