Search results for "Conservation agriculture"
showing 10 items of 12 documents
Soil organic carbon stock on the Majorca Island: temporal change in agricultural soil over the last 10 years
2019
8 Pags.- 5 Tabls.- 3 Figs.
Humusica 2, article 19: Techno humus systems and global change - Conservation agriculture and 4/1000 proposal
2018
International audience; Philosophy can overlap pedology. It is not casual that life begins and finishes in the soil. We separated the concepts of Humipedon, Copedon and Lithopedon. Some sections were dedicated to the founders of the movement for a new type of agriculture (agroecology). They simply proclaim to accompany the process of natural evolution instead of spending a lot of energy in hunting competitor organisms with pesticides or boosting the soil with mineral fertilisation and tillage. The core of the article is built on a biological concept of the soil and shows researches supporting this view. After pointing to the soil structure and illustrating its natural genesis, explaining wh…
Identification of weed community traits response to conservation agriculture
2013
International audience; Conservation agriculture is designed to deliver more sustainable cropping systems by preserving agricultural soils with tillage abandonment. However, knowledge on the impacts of Conservation agriculture adoption on weed infestation level and potential shifts in the composition of weed communities appears low and contradictory. We used a trait-based approach to investigate whether there are shifts in values of a set of traits within weed communities following the adoption of Direct Drilling with cover-crop (DD) which is one of the Conservation Agriculture practices. Weed surveys were conducted across a range of times since conversion to DD in 52 winter wheat fields lo…
Soil Quality as Affected by Intensive Versus Conservative Agricultural Managements
2017
Soils, the earth’s skin, are at the intersection of the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. The persistence of life on our planet depends on the maintenance of soils as they constitute the biological engines of earth. Human population has increased exponentially in recent decades, along with the demand for food, materials, and energy, which have caused a shift from low-yield and subsistence agriculture to a more productive, high-cost, and intensive agriculture. However, soils are very fragile ecosystems and require centuries for their development, thus within the human timescale they are not renewable resources. Modern and intensive agriculture implies serious concern about…
Agroecology and Strategies for Climate Change
2012
; Sustainable agriculture is a rapidly growing field aiming at producing food and energy in a sustainable way for humans and their children. Sustainable agriculture is a discipline that addresses current issues such as climate change, increasing food and fuel prices, poor-nation starvation, rich-nation obesity, water pollution, soil erosion, fertility loss, pest control, and biodiversity depletion.Novel, environmentally-friendly solutions are proposed based on integrated knowledge from sciences as diverse as agronomy, soil science, molecular biology, chemistry, toxicology, ecology, economy, and social sciences. Indeed, sustainable agriculture decipher mechanisms of processes that occur fro…
Weed seeds ability to emerge on the soil surface
2015
International audience; Annual weeds have to produce seeds each year to maintain their populations. These seeds fallon the soil surface. Seeds exposed to light during their moistening (i.e. caused by rain) bettergerminate than seeds in the darkness (i.e. buried). However, rare studies quantified the unique andcombined effects of light, moisture and burial depth on the germination process. We investigated,in a greenhouse experiment in 2014, the impact of seed moisture (Moistened vs. Dried), lightduring moistening (Darkness vs. Light) and burial depth (Buried vs. Surface) on germination of 12annual weed species contrasted on their seed traits and germination periods (Alopecurusmyosuroides Hud…
The spatial and temporal distribution of carabid and weed seed predation in winter wheat: a comparison between conventional and conservation agricult…
2013
Carabids can be key players in weed seed predation within arable crops under temperate climate. Field management options, because they affect carabid communities, may represent potential levers to increase weed seed predation levels within fields. Among these options, Conservation Agriculture is often presented as a promising management option for carabids but its effect on weed seed predation levels is less clear. In this study, carabids and weed seed predation were monitored using a grid sampling from April till September 2011 in two adjacent winter-wheat fields in North-eastern France, one conducted as no-till with cover crop for 5 years (conservation agriculture) and the other as conven…
Weed flora evolution in direct seeding under cover systems
2018
Direct seeding under cover, by its emergent properties, raises new questions of research on weed communities. The absence of soil disturbance and the implementation of cover crops, modify all factors of conventional agriculture and lead to a complete change of habitat for and management of the weed flora. In addition, these systems allow the development of a certain number of animal communities that interact with one another and with plant communities and thus potentially promote the regulations expected in Agroecology. Finally, there is the issue of annual weed species diversity in systems where tillage is strongly reduced. This thesis, started in November 2017, has as main objective to pr…
Weed flora evolution in direct seeding under cover systems
2019
Since the beginning of agriculture, farmers have been working the soil to produce. With the apparition of mechanization (development of plow coupled to tractors in the early 20th century), this practice has intensified and widespread on all farms. However, in France, since the 2000s, more and more farmers are questioning the utility of working the soil to produce. A new form of agriculture has appeared; the direct seeding under cover which groups together a set of cropping systems that meet certain requirements: no tillage, maximum vegetation cover and diversified rotation. By its emergent properties, this new form of agriculture raises new questions of research that mobilize both agronomy …
Co-design and test of biodiversity-based pesticide-free Conservation Agriculture in the long-term CA-SYS platform in France
2022
The French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) has established an ambitious experimental infrastructure (the CA-SYS platform) in autumn 2018 after 5 years of co-design with farmers, crop advisors and researchers. CA-SYS covers an area of 125ha divided into 42 fields. The originality of CA-SYS is that it is explicitly conceivedfor the design and evaluation of biodiversity-based and pesticide-free agroecological systems across agriculturallyrealistic scales. An agroecological system will comprise a matrix of fields of one (or a few) cropping systems over anumber of years interacting with adjacent semi-natural habitats (hedges, grass margin strips, flower strips). Thisspatio-te…