Cover crops slow erosion, improve soil, smother weeds, enhance nutrient and moisture availability, help control many pests and bring a host of other benefits to your farm. At the same time, they can reduce costs, increase profits and even create new sources of income. You¿ll reap dividends on your cover crop investments for years, since their benefits accumulate over the long term. This book will help you find which ones are right for you. Captures farmer and other research results from the past ten years. The authors verified the info. from the 2nd ed., added new results and updated farmer profiles and research data, and added 2 chap. Includes maps and charts, detailed narratives about individual cover crop species, and chap. about aspects of cover cropping.

This book is a much-expanded and updated edition of a previous volume, published in 1996 as "No-tillage Seeding: Science and Practice". The base objective remains to describe, in lay terms, a range of international experiments designed to examine the causes of successes and failures in no-tillage. The book summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of no tillage and highlights the pros and cons of a range of features and options, without promoting any particular product.

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.

Mr. Faulkner’s masterpiece is recognized as the most important challenge to agricultural orthodoxy that has been advanced in this century. Its new philosophy of the soil, based on proven principles and completely opposed to age-old concepts, has had a strong impact upon theories of cultivation around the world. It was on July 5, 1943, when Plowman’s Folly was first issued, that the author startled a lethargic public, long bemused by the apparently insoluble problem of soil depletion, by saying, simply, “The fact is that no one has ever advanced a scientific reason for plowing.” With the key sentence, he opened a new era.For generations, our reasoning about the management of the soil has rested upon the use of the moldboard plow. Mr. Faulkner proved rather conclusively that soil impoverishment, erosion, decreasing crop yields, and many of the adverse effects following droughts or periods of excessive rainfall could be traced directly to the practice of plowing natural fertilizers deep into the soil. Through his own test-plot and field-scale experiments, in which he prepared the soil with a disk harrow, in emulation of nature’s way on the forest floor and in the natural meadow, by incorporating green manures into its surface, he transformed ordinary, even inferior, soils into extremely productive, high-yield croplands.Time magazine called this concept “one of the most revolutionary ideas in agriculture history.” The volume is being made available again not only because farmers, ranchers, gardeners, and agriculturists demanded it, but also because it details the kind of “revolution” which will aid those searching for the fruits of the earth in the emerging nations.

A sociological study of changing farming methods, Conservation Tillage and Cropping Innovation investigates those techniques that have gradually continued to replace the plow culture. With thorough documentation of the conservation tillage and cropping revolution, this book features chapters on: The Social Construction of Innovative Networks; Planning Conservation Cropping: Implications for Research, Development, and Extension; The New Agriculture of Conservation Cropping: Present and Future.

"'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."

Soil Management and Climate Change: Effects on Organic Carbon, Nitrogen Dynamics, and Greenhouse Gas Emissions provides a state of the art overview of recent findings and future research challenges regarding physical, chemical and biological processes controlling soil carbon, nitrogen dynamic and greenhouse gas emissions from soils. This book is for students and academics in soil science and environmental science, land managers, public administrators and legislators, and will increase understanding of organic matter preservation in soil and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. Given the central role soil plays on the global carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycles and its impact on greenhouse gas emissions, there is an urgent need to increase our common understanding about sources, mechanisms and processes that regulate organic matter mineralization and stabilization, and to identify those management practices and processes which mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, helping increase organic matter stabilization with suitable supplies of available N. - Provides the latest findings about soil organic matter stabilization and greenhouse gas emissions - Covers the effect of practices and management on soil organic matter stabilization - Includes information for readers to select the most suitable management practices to increase soil organic matter stabilization

No-till farming (sometimes called zero tillage) is a way of growing crops from year to year without disturbing the soil through tillage. No-till increases the amount of water in the soil, decreases erosion, increases the amount and variety of life in and on the soil and it increases herbicide usage. There is evidence that repeated tillage destroys the soil resource base and causes adverse environmental impacts. Tillage degrades the fertility of soils, causes air and water pollution, intensifies drought stress, consumes fuel, and contributes to global warming. Today, farmers are expected to produce food in ever greater quantities. This is becoming more difficult to do in view of declining soil quality, which can be caused by soil tillage. It is becoming well known that no-till is an effective technique to reduce the degradation of soil. With this way of farming, crop residues or other organic amenities are retained on the soil surface and sowing/fertilising is done with minimal soil disturbance. This book gathers the latest research from around the globe in this field of study.