Practice of Conservation Agriculture for Sustaining Agro-Ecosystem: A Review

Conservation agriculture has the potential to emerge as an effective strategy to the increasing concerns of serious and widespread natural resources’ degradation and environmental pollution, which accompanied the adoption and promotion of green revolution technologies since the early seventies. The key challenge today is to adopt strategies that will address the twin concerns of maintaining and enhancing the integrity of natural resources and improved productivity, while improvement of natural resources takes a lead as it forms the very basis for long-term sustained productivity. Land preparation through precision land leveling and bed and furrow configuration for planting crops further enable improved resource management. Over the past 2–3 decades globally, this concept has emerged as a way for transition to the sustainability of intensive production systems. Conservation agriculture (CA) can be seen as a new way forward for conserving resources and enhancing productivity to achieve the goals of sustainable agriculture, which demands a strong knowledge base and a combination of institutional and technological innovations. There is a need for policy analyses to understand how conservation technologies integrate with other technologies, policy instruments and institutional arrangements that promote or deter this system. As CA practices result in resource improvement only gradually and benefit in terms of crop yields may not come about immediately, evaluation and impact of CA practices therefore needs a longer term and a broader perspective which goes beyond yield increases only. CA is now considered a route to sustainable agriculture. Spread of CA, therefore will call for a greatly strengthened research and linked development efforts.