Technical guidelines - The publication is aimed at those who are supporting farmers in adopting and adapting conservation agriculture. It is intended to be used as a training aid in training illiterate and semi-literate farmers in conservation agriculture. It provides for storytelling and pictographic training methodologies that can be easily adapted to the training needs, at local level, of farmers. There is also a video to accompany this publication.

Technical guidelines - Conservation Agriculture is actually applied on about 10% of the world’s cropland and adoption is growing fast. However, it is not growing fast enough to face the challenges ahead, such as the need to eradicate hunger and food insecurity for a growing population and to address the threats of climate change, land and environmental degradation, resource scarcity and increasing cost of food, production inputs and energy. For “sustainable intensification” strategy as being implemented through Conservation Agriculture to spread faster, it needs not only the accurate application of the concept and principles, but also supportive policies that can facilitate adoption of Conservation Agriculture and reward the adopters for example with payments for environmental...

Technical guidelines - This is a book which examines in great detail the design and implementation of a rural development project for smallholder farmers in Paraguay. Over a period of seven years, from 2003 to 2010, the project applied the basic concepts of conservation agriculture, forestry and agroforestry benefiting 17 thousand farm families in the Eastern Province of the country. The practices promoted closely paralleled those being recommended for sustainable crop production intensification by FAO which seek to enhance agricultural productivity whilst protecting the natural environment and improving ecosystem services.The conservation agriculture practices focus on hand and animal powered systems of direct planting, permanent soil cover and crop associations, successions and rotations. Agroforestry...

Papers - This paper reviews (a) the principles that underpin conservation agriculture ecologically and operationally; (b) the potential benefits that can be harnessed through CA systems in the dry Mediterranean climate; (c) current status of adoption and spread of CA in the dry Mediterranean climate countries; and (d) opportunities for CA in the Central and West Asia and North Africa region.

Technical guidelines - Soil organic matter plays a crucial role in maintaining soil health and its productivity potential. However, most of the world’s agricultural soils have become depleted in organic matter compared with their state under natural vegetation. This isbecause the dominant form of agriculture is based on tillage, which accelerates the decomposition of soil organic matter.Tillage-based production systems should therefore be transformed so that the future production intensification can be achieved sustainably. Conservation Agriculture, a system avoiding or minimizing soil disturbance, combined with soil cover and crop diversification, is considered to be such sustainable production system. However, there appears to be certain degree of uncertainty about the role of Conservation Agriculture in...