Agriculture carbon sequestration may be one of the most cost effective ways to slow process of global warning. With no-till, crop residues are left more naturally on the surface to protect the soil. Intensive agriculture has contributed to water contamination, erosion sedimentation and to the greenhouse effect, with tillage induced carbon dioxide (CO2) losses. However, no-till management techniques have shown that scientific agriculture can also be a solution to environmental issues in general, specifically to mitigating the greenhouse effect. Improved agricultural practices such as no-till or conservation tillage have the potential to mitigate more carbon (C) in the soil than farming emits through land use and fossil fuel combustion. Thus, a combination of the economic and C-related environmental benefits of enhanced soil management through reduced labor requirement, time savings, reduced machinery and fuel savings with no-till has universal appeal. Indirect measures of social benefits will be difficult to quantity as society enjoys a higher quality of life from environmental quality enhancement. Working in harmony with nature by using no-till techniques that increase carbon in the soil can be viewed as both “feeding and greening the world” for global sustainability.
*C-related: Carbon related |
Soil quality is the fundamental foundation for environmental quality. Soil quality is largely governed by soil organic matter content, which is dynamic and responds effectively to changes in soil management, primary tillage and carbon input. Maintaining soil quality can reduce problem of land degradation, decreasing soil fertility, and rapidly declining production levels that occur in large parts of the world needing the basic principles of good farming practices. The extreme forms of intensive inversion tillage that includes the moldboard plow, disk harrow and certain types powered rotary tillage tools cannot be considered a form of conservation.
On the other hand, cropland offers a huge potential for sequestrating carbon especially when crop residues are managed properly. Crop residues management is a widely used cropland conservation practice. A crop residue provides significant quantities of nutrients for crop production. When using no-till methods, most crop residues are retained on the soil surface and not incorporated by tillage, destroyed by burning, or removed for other purposes, by adopting crop residue management practices you can improve soil quality, reduce soil erosion and runoff, enhance moisture retention, lower summer soil temperatures, reduce trips across the field, reduce machinery cost and at the same time increase the net return to the farmer. |
