Conservation Agriculture Research Updates - June 2024

This paper starts by saying that although CA facilitates build-up of SOC, the sequestration potential of arable soils is affected by edaphic factors and is not well understood. The research used an on-farm approach with pairwise comparison of 21 conventional vs highly innovative ‘pioneer’ farms across a wide range of arable soil types and evaluated the leverage of site attributes and management practices such as crop diversity, reduced tillage, organic fertilization, cover cropping and inter cropping on the SOC sequestration potential. While most pioneer management practices proved beneficial for the sequestration of SOC – particularly cover cropping and crop diversity – our results clearly show that soil texture was the most significant shaping factor. Coarse-textured soils had a significantly higher potential for SOC accrual compared to medium- and fine-textured soils. The initial SOC content also had a significant effect on prevalent sequestration potentials. They conclude that carbon farming schemes need reconsideration within the state-of-the-art scientific framework of carbon saturation behavior in order to properly account for biophysical constraints when formulating soil-related climate change mitigation policies.