Conservation Agriculture for Sustainable Crop Intensification An Overview

Abstract

Conservation Agriculture (CA) has been identified as a promising technology for sustainable crop intensification worldwide. But in India sufficient work has not been done on the subject except remarkable work being done in irrigated rice-wheat zone across the Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar with the support of international development agencies since last few years. Thus, there is need to focus more on dryland production systems where the applicability of CA is even more considering their higher vulnerability to climate change effects and need to reverse the process of soil degradation in drylands which are expected to play more crucial role in food security of the nation in days to come. In this review, attempt has been made to present the potential benefits of CA on resource conservation with particular focus on soil and water, soil quality, stable crop yields, input use efficiency, benefits at ecosystem level, farm profitability and crop resilience to climate change effects. Besides, the major challenges that need to be overcome to promote CA and the tradeoffs with livestock production at regional and trans-regional have also been discussed.