Abstract
Conservation agriculture (CA) is considered a sustainable practice with the potential to maintain or increase crop productivity and improve environmental quality and ecosystem services. It typically improves soil quality and water conservation; however, its effect on crop productivity is highly variable and dependent on local conditions/management. Crop residue retention plays a crucial role in CA and can help to improve overall soil health and ultimately crop productivity and sustainability. However, weed control, herbicide resistance, and weed shift under residue retained fields is a major challenge. Moreover, CA can increase water infiltration and reduce soil loss and runoff. This reduces the surface transport of nitrate and phosphorus from agricultural fields and the eutrophication of water bodies, although leaching of nitrate to groundwater can potentially increase. In addition, CA has been proposed as one of the components in climate-smart agriculture, owing to its reduced period to seed/plant next crop, reduced soil disturbance and low consumption of fossil fuels. Therefore, compared to the conventional intensive tillage, CA has a greater potential for soil C sequestration, favors higher soil biodiversity, lowers greenhouse gas emission, and can assist in mitigating climate change. However, not all experiments report a positive impact. The understanding and decoding the site-specific complexities of CA system is important and requires a multidisciplinary approach.
Highlights
Compared to the intensive agriculture, conservation agriculture (CA) generally enhances soil organic carbon storage, in the topsoil. This can help with climate mitigation through carbon sequestration, reduced emission of greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, nitrous oxide (N2 O)) and water regulation
Not all experiments report that CA has a positive impact on ecosystem services (ES)
This can be due to the duration of experiments, as well as cropping system, climate, soil type and land management practices
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. CA is often advocated as a sustainable farming practice that can maintain or increase crop productivity, and improve carbon storage, environmental quality, and ecosystem services (ES) [2,3,4,5,6]. CA is widely advocated as a sustainable agricultural practice that can maintain or increase crop productivity, and improves environmental quality [10] (Figure 1a,b). Conservation agriculture changes soil properties and processes compared to conventional tillage-based agriculture These changes can affect a number of ES (Table 1 and Figures 1 and 3), including: Provisioning services—CA can have influence on yield and productivity and, the provision of food and fiber.
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