Institutional and policy support for Conservation Agriculture uptake

Abstract

Agriculture is always under pressure to change or adapt to biophysical, social and economic conditions. Farmers are the ultimate convenors of change at the farm level in response to perceived pressures and opportunities. Those drivers may be on their farm in terms of crop, soil or livestock performance or in a top–down manner from public or private policies at regional or national and international scales. In the first half of the twentieth century agriculture underwent a revolution based upon machinery and chemistry. The labour-saving devices of tractors, seeding and harvesting machinery allowed farms to expand their area with fewer labourers. The chemical advancements in fertilizer and herbicides allowed monoculture and yield increases along with higher yielding and diseaseresistant varieties of crops. By the mid-twentieth century the assemblages of technology and science helped farmers focus on maximum production and sales or exports. Global food production more than doubled from 1960 to 2000; in China it increased five-fold in the 1980s–90s (Pretty and Bharucha, 2014). The increased production, however, was not without costs. Ramankutty et al. (2018) acknowledge the success of the Green Revolution in increasing production and the need for more areas under production to meet future food security but in doing so we will negatively impact water resources and cause soil degradation, biodiversity loss and increased greenhouse gas emissions.