conservation agriculture – One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?

Two new videos exploring conservation agriculture were recently shared. The first looks back to the US dust bowl in the 1930s that motivated the development of no-till farming and conservation agriculture. The second looking at how conservation agriculture can help in practice and how we can prevent the next dust bowl in the Russian Steppes through sustainable land management strategies.

Changing an Age-Old Practice Helps New Generation of Farmers, is the title of a new video created by the World Bank. Tilling of soil is done to prepare the seed bed, release nutrients and control weeds but tilling can also lead to soil erosion, causing the loss of top soil that degrades farmland and causes sedimentation in waterways. In the lower Mississippi River removal of sediment costs over $100 million each year. In the Great Plains of the US around the 1930s the dust bowl winds eroded top soil from 65 million hectares of land and led to an unprecedented environmental disaster. Soil degradation globally is increasing due to climate change whereby more frequent storms and floods erode vulnerable soils. The disturbance of these soils releases greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to climate change.

Conservation agriculture is proposed as a solution, which comprises no tillage of the soil or minimum disturbance of the soil; the maintenance of crop residue in the field; and crop rotations and species diversity. These practices help to reduce soil erosion, allow recovery of the soil structure, reduce pests and diseases, conserve water and build up nutrient stores. Such practices are also said to be more labour and cost efficient. Breaking the centuries old tradition of tilling the soil is not easy however, and requires the development of new herbicides, new equipment and farmer education. But the benefits conservation agriculture can bring, such as relatively inexpensive climate change adaptation and mitigation and sustainable farms into the future, far outweigh the costs.

How to prevent the next “Global Dust Bowl”? – Ecological and Economic Strategies for Sustainable Land Management in the Russian Steppes: A Potential Solution to Climate Change was produced by Kulunda, an interdisciplinary project on sustainable land management. The Kulunda Steppe in Siberia close to the border with Kazakhstan has dry continental climate conditions. In the 1950s about 420,000km² of natural grassland were converted to farming. In recent decades crop yields have been continually declining as a result of low soil fertility and carbon, wind erosion and drought, and today some 50% of these lands are degraded. Because of the arid climate the soil neither stores water nor nutrients well and conventional agricultural methods are failing leading to the out-migration of young people. [Read more…]

Filed Under: 13 - Rooted in the Soil Tagged With: climate change, conservation agriculture, dust bowl, land management, no-till, Russia

What we’ve been reading this week

April 6, 2014 by canwefeedtheworld Leave a Comment

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Sharp rise in FAO Food Price Index, FAO

Spreading the word about the no-till agricultural revolution, IIED

On the road to Paris 2015: Towards a new global climate deal, Friends of Europe

Fake Meats, Finally, Taste Like Chicken, The New York Times

‘How DFID Learns’. Or doesn’t. UK aid watchdog gives it a ‘poor’ (but the rest of us would probably do worse), Duncan Green, Oxfam

Realising the Promise of Agriculture for Africa’s Transformation, PAEPARD

Global food security: could wheat feed the world?, The Guardian

Commentary Series – This Land is Our Land, Global Food for Thought

3 Graphics To Explain The Present And Future Of Climate Change, Forbes

Climate signals, growing louder, The New York Times [Read more…]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Africa, climate, climate change, conservation agriculture, DFID, food prices, food security, GM, IIED, land grabs, land tenure, no-till, synthetic meat, WFP, wheat, World Bank

Scaling Up Sustainable Land and Water Management Practices

January 18, 2014 by canwefeedtheworld 2 Comments

Land degradation and declining soil fertility are major threats to agricultural productivity and food production, particularly in the drylands of sub-Saharan Africa, where land management practices, high fertiliser prices and water shortages contribute and exacerbate the problems. The World Resources Institute have previously calculated that to eradicate food insecurity we need to produce 69% more calories between 2006 and 2050, while at the same time protecting the world’s water, climate and ecosystems. A new report by the WRI entitled Improving Land and Water Management, instalment four of their Creating a Sustainable Food Future series, outlines some of the land and water management practices that can mitigate land degradation and increase agricultural output. They highlight four practices that are particularly promising, which along with raising yields and productivity can increase incomes, natural capital and resilience to climate change. These are:

Agroforestry – the integration of trees and shrubs onto farms

Conservation agriculture – the combination of reduced or no tillage, crop rotations and on-farm conservation of crop residues or cover crops

Rainwater harvesting – the use of on-farm systems such as bunds, pits and trenches, to collect rainfall and prevent water loss from soils

Integrated soil fertility management – the incorporation of prudent and targeted use of fertiliser with organic alternatives such as manure, compost, leaf litter, crop residues and phosphate rock

The report provides evidence of the impacts these farming practices can have, for example, the combination of conservation agriculture and crop rotations has resulted in 50% higher yields of maize in Zambia. These practices can be combined with each other as well as with more conventional technologies e.g. microdosing of fertilisers.

Implementing and combining these four techniques at scale will require much coordination between different users of the landscape, warranting an integrated landscape approach that acknowledges and plans for multiple land uses. Adoption of these practices is currently low and the main barriers to successful scaling include poor knowledge dissemination, weak land tenure systems and poor coverage of extension services. The potential of these improved land and water management practices has been calculated: if implemented on some 75 million hectares of cropland, with an expected increase in yields of 50%, farmers would produce 22 million tons more food each year, equating to an extra 615 kilocalories per person per day for 285 million people living in Africa’s drylands. [Read more…]