Global CA-CoP CONSERVATION AGRICULTURE COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE
for sustainable agriculture,
land use and ecosystem management
Alert No. 70 (2 December 2021)
5. Potato and soil conservation. International Year of the Potato 2008. FAO.
9. Climate-Smart Agriculture Case Studies; Projects from Around the World. FAO. 2021.
Amir Kassam
Moderator
Global CA-CoP
URL: http://www.fao.org/conservation-agriculture
URL: http://www.act-africa.org/
URL: https://ecaf.org/
URL: http://www.caa-ap.org/
Conservation Agriculture (CA) is an ecological approach to regenerative sustainable agriculture and ecosystem management based on the practical application of context-specific and locally adapted three interlinked principles of: (i) Continuous no or minimum mechanical soil disturbance (no-till seeding/planting and weeding, and minimum soil disturbance with all other farm operations including harvesting); (ii) permanent maintenance of soil mulch cover (crop biomass, stubble and cover crops); and (iii) diversification of cropping system (economically, environmentally and socially adapted rotations and/or sequences and/or associations involving annuals and/or perennials, including legumes and cover crops). These practices are complemented with other complementary good agricultural production and land management practices to generate and sustain optimum performance.
CA systems are present in all continents, involving rainfed and irrigated systems including annual cropland systems, perennial systems, orchards and plantation systems, agroforestry systems, crop-livestock systems, pasture and rangeland systems, organic production systems and rice-based systems. CA systems operate regeneratively at multiple levels to optimally harness a range of productivity, economic, environmental, and social benefits as well as address local and global concerns related to food and water security, climate change, land degradation, biodiversity and smallholder agricultural development.
Conservation Tillage, Reduced Tillage, Low tillage and Minimum Tillage are not CA, and nor is No-Till on its own. For a practice or a method to be referred to as a CA practice or method, it must be part of a CA system. If not, then it is what it is, a practice or a method similar to any other with its own name e.g., no-till seeding, or mulching, or crop diversification, etc (more at: http://www.fao.org/conservation-agriculture).
The 2015/16 CA area information available from: Global spread of Conservation Agriculture. By A. Kassam et al. International Journal of Environmental Studies. Published Online (2018).
The 2018/19 CA area information is available at: CA Stat — CA Global (ca-global.net)
---------
To subscribe to the CA-CoP-L list, send an e-mail to [log in to unmask] leaving the subject line blank and placing only the one-line message: ‘SUBSCRIBE CA-CoP-L Name Surname’ in the message part without any further text such as an address, etc.
To unsubscribe from the CA-CoP-L list, send an e-mail message to [log in to unmask] leaving the subject line blank and placing only the one-line message: 'SIGNOFF CA-CoP-L' in the message part without any further text such as a name, address, etc.
To unsubscribe from the CA-Cop-L list, click the following link:
&*TICKET_URL(CA-Cop-L,SIGNOFF);