What is Conservation Agriculture?
Conservation agriculture is a collection of practices designed to create a high-quality soil structure and improve overall soil health. The practices aim to protect soil from erosion and degradation, enrich soil quality and biodiversity, and increase infiltration rates, which reduces surface runoff into local waterways. The primary goals of conservation agriculture are: minimal soil disturbance, maximize soil cover, increase biodiversity, and maintain living roots.
Minimal Soil Disturbance:
Build soil structure by using no-till or minimal-till practices. By keeping the soil intact, we allow the root channels to serve as pathways for rain and snowmelt. This supports water infiltration and reduces runoff.
Maximize Soil Cover
Maximizing soil cover helps protect the soil from wind and water erosion. Planting a cover crop is an excellent way to protect soil in an agricultural system. Cover crops help keep soil in place, while also providing additional benefits like feeding the soil biology, building soil organic matter, improving soil infiltration, and adding diversity into the system.
Maintain Living Roots
Keeping a living root in the ground year round supports water infiltration. Instead of water rushing off a field, a living cover crop acts as a water pump, pulling water into the soil profile. This not only helps reduce nutrient and soil loss, but it helps store water for later in the season.
Increase biodiversity
Increasing biodiversity can look different depending on your operation. In some cases, this may mean getting livestock back on the land through intensive managed grazing of either perennial pasture or grazing cover crops. In other situations, this may be using manure more efficiently and applying smaller quantities, multiple times throughout the year. Applying manure with a low-disturbance injector, allows a farm to get the nutrients into the root zone where it can be utilized by a growing crop. This increases the likelihood of nutrient uptake and reduces the chance for nutrient loss.
Additionally, farms can increase biodiversity by planting diverse mixes of cover crops and pollinator strips. These practices support the habitat needed for pollinators and beneficial insects that prey on nuisance pests like slugs.