Conservation Agriculture
Technology, 2023
Reducing soil tillage, continuous soil cover and crop diversification.
The context in which farmers operate has seen a series of important changes in recent years. Climate change causes, in addition to gradual increases in temperatures, an increase in the frequency of droughts and other extreme phenomena. In addition, the war in Ukraine has led to chain disruptions in the agricultural input supply sector. So, the pressure on farmers' profitability is ever greater.
In addition, the new Common Agricultural Policy 2021-2027 introduces a new set of conditionality criteria for farmers. The receipt of subsidies is now, more than ever, conditioned by the implementation of certain sustainable practices on farms.
Conservation agriculture encompasses an approach that addresses all these challenges, being associated with greater farm resilience to climate shocks, cost optimization and compatibility with the European Union's agricultural development strategy.
Regarding the set of practices that define conservation agriculture, they can fall into three broad categories: 1. Minimum tillage systems; 2. Covering the soil with stubble mulch or cover crops; 3. Crop diversification in time and space.
In the GreenFields community, farmers demonstrate through their own experiences on the farm that conservation agriculture is not a set of predefined practices, but is the result of searches for optimal solutions, specific to each farm.
Most of the time, the indicator of the beginning of the transition to conservation agriculture is the abandonment of moldboard plowing. Although this step must be taken in an informed way, examples from farms pioneering this approach show that there are viable alternatives.
We exemplify below an alternative to plowing, by mobilizing the soil in depth with a paraplow, intended for decompaction.