ABSTRACT
Latin American agriculture of the twenty-first century faces many challenges. Firstly, the soils of Latin America suffer from extensive soil degradation, especially soil erosion, a result of the transfer of agricultural practices and technology from Europe. The conventional European plough-based tillage proved inefficient and even detrimental for tropical soils low in organic matter (Speratti et al., 2015). As a result, neither improved varieties of crops nor other inputs are able to deliver their potential (Sayre and Govaerts, 2011).
