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"'Published by the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program, with funding from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture."
Sustainable agricultural practices involve a variety of approaches. The most important approached for sustainable agriculture development is crop diversification. It allowing the farmers to employ biological cycles to minimize inputs, conserve the resource base, maximize yields and also reduce the risk due to ecological and environmental factors. It serves as an important opportunity to augment income and employment generation for rural communities. Crop diversification promotes the interaction of beneficial soil bacteria, interrupts the disease cycle, and reduces the quantity of weeds. Crop diversification boosts land-use efficiency and crop output by improving the physical and chemical qualities of soil. Crop diversification shows a lot of scope to alleviating the problems such as resurgence of insects-pests and weeds, soil degradation, environmental pollution, soil salinity, decline farm profit and climate change. Crop diversification through crop intensification system enhanced the net returns, B:C ratio, and overall system productivity of a farm. In order to achieve the benefits of crop diversification farmers are shifting from low value low yielding crops to high value high yielding crops. Thus, crop diversification has the sound capacity for achieving the goal of nutritional security, income growth, food security, employment generation and sustainable agriculture development.
Improvements in rice growing technologies during the last two decades have resulted in a number of countries, especially in the humid tropical regions of Asia, nearing self-sufficiency in rice production. Consequently, policies are shifting in these countries toward minimizing the under-utilization of land by increasing the cropping intensity of irrigated areas, particularly by growing non-rice crops during the dry season. These workshop papers discuss the advantages of and constraints to crop diversification in different country situations throughout Asia.
Continued population growth, rapidly changing consumption patterns and the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are driving limited resources of food, energy, water and materials towards critical thresholds worldwide. These pressures are likely to be substantial across Africa, where countries will have to find innovative ways to boost crop and livestock production to avoid becoming more reliant on imports and food aid. Sustainable agricultural intensification - producing more output from the same area of land while reducing the negative environmental impacts - represents a solution for millions of African farmers. This volume presents the lessons learned from 40 sustainable agricultural intensification programmes in 20 countries across Africa, commissioned as part of the UK Government's Foresight project. Through detailed case studies, the authors of each chapter examine how to develop productive and sustainable agricultural systems and how to scale up these systems to reach many more millions of people in the future. Themes covered include crop improvements, agroforestry and soil conservation, conservation agriculture, integrated pest management, horticulture, livestock and fodder crops, aquaculture, and novel policies and partnerships.
Agricultural diversification can occur in many forms (e.g., genetic variety, species, structural) and can be created temporally and over different spatially scales (e.g., within crop, within field, and landscape level). Crop diversification is the practice of growing more than one crop species within a farming area in the form of rotations (two or more crops on the same field in different years), multiple crops (more than one crop in the same season on the same field) or intercropping (at least two crops simultaneously on the same field). Various cropping strategies and management practices, such as diversification of cropping systems by crop rotation, conservation tillage, and the use of cover crops, have been promoted to enhance crop productivity and ecosystem services. However, the opportunities and means differ among regions and the actual effects of diversification on cropping system sustainability still need more investigation. This Special Issue covers the state-of-the-art and recent progress in different aspects related to agricultural diversification to increase the sustainability and resilience of a wide range of cropping systems (grassland, horticultural crops, fruit trees) and in a scenario of environmental challenges due to climate change: - Crop production and quality; - Impact of crop diversification on soil quality and biodiversity; - Environmental impact and delivery of ecosystem services by crop diversification.