14
last year's crop residue on the surface before and during planting operations to pro-
vide cover for the soil at a critical time of the year. The residue is left on the surface
by reducing tillage operations and turning the soil less, even when the amount of
residue is less than desired, particularly during drought years. Although this meets
the first principle of CA in terms of minimal soil disturbance, it does not meet the
second principle regarding soil cover based on the criteria that FAO uses to collect
global data for adoption of CA. Global data of CA adoption are not officially
reported, but collected from local farmer and interest groups. The data are assem-
bled and published by FAO. For data collection, FAO has quantified the CA defini-
tion as follows (Friedrich et al. 2012 ):
- Minimum Soil Disturbance: Minimum soil disturbance refers to low disturbance
no-tillage and direct seeding. The disturbed area must be less than 15 cm wide or
less than 25 % of the cropped area (whichever is lower). There should be no
periodic tillage that disturbs a greater area than the aforementioned limits. Strip
tillage is allowed if the disturbed area is less than the set limits. - Organic Soil Cover: Three categories are distinguished: 30–60 %, >60–90 % and
90 % ground cover, measured immediately after the direct seeding operation.
Areas with less than 30 % cover are not considered CA.
- Crop Rotations/Associations: Rotation/association should involve at least three
different crops. However, repetitive wheat or maize cropping is not an exclusion
factor for the purpose of this data collection, but rotation/association is recorded
where practiced.
Therefore, even though CA largely stemmed from dryland farming, many dry-
land farming cropping systems do not qualify as CA systems due to the lack of suf-
ficient crop residues. Limited precipitation and shorter growing periods allow only a
small amount of crop residue to be returned to the soil. To make things worse, many
dryland farming areas, especially in developing countries, have high rates of poverty
and many crop residues are removed from the land for animal feed or for cooking
and heating fuel. This can cause already low soil organic matter concentrations to
become even lower resulting in lower soil quality. As already illustrated in Fig. 4 ,
developing a sustainable cropping system becomes increasingly difficult in marginal
climatic regions. However, adoption of reduced tillage and continuous cropping can
increase dryland nitrogen (N) storage to a depth of 20 cm compared to a conven-
tional farming practice, and hence, a no-till system provides better opportunities to
sustain crop yields by growing more crops and to conserve soil carbon (C) and N
more than the traditional tillage practice in the drylands of the U.S. Great Plains
(Sainju et al., 2006 ). In the U.S. Northern Great Plains, continuous cropping with
no-tillage improved soil and crop management practices and increased dryland soil
C sequestration from 0 to 15 cm depth by 233 kg C ha−^1 year−^1 compared to a loss of
141 kg C ha−^1 year−^1 with conventional tillage (Halvorson et al. 2002 ). CA systems
allow producers to increase cropping intensity because no-till conserves surface resi-
dues and retains water in the soil profile more than conventional tillage practices
(Aase and Pikul 2000 ; Farhani et al. 1998 ). Similarly, data collected from Bushland,
TX in the southern Great Plains showed that precipitation storage efficiency
increased from 15 % with disk tillage to 35 % with no-till (Unger and Wiese 1979 ).
B.A. Stewart and S. Thapa