ABSTRACT
The concept of conservation agriculture (CA) owes its wider global acceptance to its basic tenets (minimal soil disturbance, surface cover, and cropping sequences) rooted in sound scientific principles of cropping systems. CA practices hold the potential to contribute to the sustainability of agricultural developments and their adaptability to changing climate. CA recognizes the need for a paradigm shift from tilled agriculture to minimal soil disturbance and maintaining surface cover to achieve the goals of food security and reversal of land degradation processes for achieving sustainability goals. The approach aims at achieving enhanced use efficiency of external agricultural inputs, optimal use of available land and water resources, and reversing resource degradation processes. The CA approach has to be operationalized in an eco-regional or resource management domain framework. Further, it has to integrate the focus of research to address both the short- and longer-term contexts of resource use problems. CA is a problem-solving approach that calls for institutional innovations for organizing multi-disciplinary farmer participatory research teams for working out integrated solutions towards the resolution of regionally defined problems.
