Conservation agriculture impacts on productivity, resource–use efficiency and environmental sustainability: A holistic review

Abstract

Conservation Agriculture (CA) with 3 interrelated principles of minimum soil disturbance, permanent soil cover with crop residue mulch and diversified crop rotations offers a plethora of benefits. It has potential to achieve higher crop yields with concurrent improvement/ restoration in soil health and environmental quality. This has prompted rapid adoption/ expansion of CA in many countries of the world, namely, USA, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Canada, China. Astonishingly, the global area under CA has increased at 10 million ha per year since 2009, and 79 countries have adopted CA till 2015–16. The CA being a better crop and soil management practice could improve soil aggregation, carbon sequestration and soil microbial diversity, which, in turn, gave higher productivity and profitability. Lower fossil fuel use under CA owing to minimum soil disturbance may reduce greenhouse gases emission, which makes it a climate resilient technology. In spite of numerous benefits, few important constraints loom large in the form of huge weed pressure in the initial years and rapid shift/ change over to perennial and difficult–to–control weeds, unavailability of scale appropriate seeder machines and crop residue (somewhere). These usually hinder adoption of CA among the farmers, and therefore profound technical/ scientific and institutional support and encouraging government policy are of utmost requirement for wider adoption of CA. In this review, various aspects of CA relating to crop, soil, and environment have been highlighted/ discussed with a scientific background.