Is conservation agriculture climate smart, why/ why not? Also, explain what is the best sustainable approach for soil quality indicators?
Conservation agriculture (CA) is one of the Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) tools that farmers are adopting to grow food even in harsh conditions. Many scientists have praised conservation agriculture as a method of farming that can help farmers to reduce water use while boosting soil fertility and crop yields., Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an integrated approach to managing landscapes—cropland, livestock, forests and fisheries—that addresses the interlinked challenges of food security and accelerating climate change.Increasing control over production leads to better cost management and waste reduction. The ability to trace anomalies in crop growth or livestock health, for instance, helps eliminate the risk of losing yields. Additionally, automation boosts .Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) improves agricultural productivity and enhance farm income on a sustainable basis, enhance water and nutrients use efficiency, resilient to climatic stresses, and lowering the emissions of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) to a minimum level.Climate-smart crop production practices and technologies.
1 Use of quality seeds and planting materials of well-adapted crops and varieties.
2 Biodiversity management. ...
3 Integrated Pest Management. ...
4 Improved water use and management. ...
5 Sustainable soil and land management for increased crop productivity.
6 Sustainable mechanization.
Climate smart agriculture (CSA) can be defined as sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes, adapting and building resilience to climate change and reducing greenhouse gases emissionsefficiency.high-quality soil has
• Good soil tilth.
• Sufficient depth.
• Sufficient, but not excessive, nutrient supply.
• Small population of plant pathogens and insect pests.
• Good soil drainage.
• Large population of beneficial organisms.
• Low weed pressure.
• No chemicals or toxins that may harm the crop.
Let me say...a fertile soil will have much better soil health in terms of microbial load and higher plant available nutrient pool .Sustaining such fertile soil in an active health mode is perhaps most challenging. Integrated soil fertility management, cropping sequence with legumes as a part of it, use of cover crops backed up by CA are some of the viable options..Soil quality is such a wholesome term , that can accommodate any number of soil properties , but we need to keep those soil parameters as minimum as possible to eventually to be able to pinpoint those paramount properties influencing the outcome of different cropping systems.
Conservation agriculture (CA) has been proposed among technologies that are climate-smart. For a cropping system to be labelled “climate-smart” it has to deliver three benefits: a) adapt to the effects of climate and be of increased resilience; b) mitigate climate effects by sequestering carbon (C) and reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG); and c) sustainably increase productivity and income.
Article How climate-smart is conservation agriculture (CA)? – its po...
Ideal indicators should be accessible to many users, be sensitive to management & climate, be components of existing databases, and be interpretable.
http://soilquality.org/indicators.html
Conservation agriculture has 3-4 core components: minimum disturbance to the soil (zero tillage), residue retention, and crop rotation (diversification). Adoption of zero tillage especially in wheat often leads to timely sowing (prevents delayed sowing). This enables the crop to avoid or escape heat stress. Residue retention provides many advantages including enhancement of soil organic matter and increase in soil microbial diversity. In addition, it provides shading advantage to a crop like mung bean in summer, and also saves irrigation frequency. Crop diversification provides for insurance against abiotic stresses the occurrence of which have become regular features in changing climate scenario. Conservation agriculture thus serves specific (S), measurable (M), achievable (A), realistic (R) and time-bound (T) purposes. Therefore, to my opinion, conservation agriculture is climate SMART.
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