Challenges

Activities

Staff

Research on conservation agriculture and
related topics

Publications and reports

Geographic Information Systems

Challenges

The growing importance of natural resource management in agriculture requires a reversal of current resource degradation in key areas. Climate change is raising temperatures, changing weather patterns in ways that accentuate extremes like flooding and drought. Water resources for irrigated agriculture are becoming scarce. In a positive vein, research increasingly points up the potential for significant productivity gains through improved practices for farming systems.

Activities

Work builds on systems agronomy research by CIMMYT and partners around the world, particularly on cropping methods that simultaneously boost productivity and reduce resource degradation in cropping systems that include maize or wheat. Through partnerships with national agricultural research systems, agri-business, and other CGIAR centers, this Program undertakes strategic and process research with an ultimate vision of widespread sustainable systems used by smallholder wheat and maize producers based on the principles of conservation agriculture (CA). The aim is to improve rural incomes and livelihoods through sustainable management of agro-ecosystem productivity and diversity, while minimizing unfavorable environmental impacts.

Staff and partners develop appropriate practices tending to reduce tillage, provide adequate surface retention of crop residues, and incorporate diversified crop rotations to reverse soil degradation. For small- and medium-scale farmers, this fosters the more efficient and sustainable use of water and other inputs, lower production costs, better management of biotic stresses, and enhanced system diversity and production. As CA-based resource-conserving practices are adopted, research will promote an integrated evaluation of the effects of long-term conservation agriculture under diverse agro-ecological conditions, both rainfed and irrigated. Studies will focus on such factors as pest, weed, and disease dynamics; the effects of crop rotations and green manure cover crops; residue management and threshold levels of residue cover; soil nutrient dynamics and nutrient management; water management; soil structure dynamics; impacts on greenhouse gas emissions; adaptive research/policy issues; impacts on household livelihoods, local/regional economies, and food security; and varieties adapted to CA systems.

Staff

See also: CGIAR Science Council impact studies

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