Conservation agriculture across soil and environmental aridity levels

Abstract

Conservation Agriculture (CA) is a farming system that combines efficiency and low cost to prevent soil degradation, and promote soil protection through reduced or no tillage, soil cover, and crop rotations. Compared to ploughed soil, CA improves soil organic carbon accumulation in the topsoil, soil health and biodiversity, bearing capacity, widening the window for field operations reduces erosion, labour per unit area, and production costs, and increases yield stability1, and usually also farmer profit. CA increases water availability for crops through a reduce water evaporation, which improve yield at increasing aridity. In arid condition, fuel consumption for tillage accounts for 40-60% of the total cost. Thus, CA dramatically reduce the cultivation cost compared to the conventional, and may increase profit even when yields are slightly lower than conventional.