The Seminar A: Soil Science/ Agronomy on Wednesday examined the premise that “conservation agriculture is more productive” in terms of crops yields. Other salient topics included the need to integrate animals into CAPS, as well as the possibility of developing a cross-regional biophysical survey to facilitate comparison of cover crops between LTRAs.
Recurring topics
- Productivity of CAPS
- Livestock integration into CAPS
- Biophysical survey
Disagreement
- Whether CAPS are more productive systems
Processes and products
- Difficulty maintaining residue cover due to the nature of farming systems
- Resilience
- Ken Giller article
- Agroecology
Conclusions
- Animal integration is a prerequisite for scaling up CAPS and may require consensus building among stakeholder; possible methods for managing animals should be shared between LTRAs
- Productivity of CAPS will depend on the nature of the cropping system it replaces, but is more economically efficient and resilient (due to increased soil quality) than plow-based agricultural systems
- A cross-regional biophysical survey should be created an include information on climate, soils, key crops, elevation, latitude, and cover crop successes and failures