Methodological aspects of assessing conservation agriculture efficency

Abstract

The current research is aimed at working out methodological basis of assessing conservation agriculture efficiency based on the practical experience. The traditional system of land use is now to be totally reconsidered due to its negative environmental effects with new practices to be implemented that can increase productivity, protect soil from degradation and deal with the current climatic crisis, i.e. help adapt to the climate change, decrease greenhouse gas emissions and increase soil carbon sequestration. Conservation agriculture (CA) is the technology that can help overcome all the above mentioned challenges being defined as the approach of managing agricultural ecosystems that provides for the sustainable agricultural production, lower energetic and labor expenses and higher efficiency of utilizing soil and water resources. Given its major goal of preserving soil health conservation agriculture is to be evaluated based on the combination of ecological and economic effects, rather than on the economic effect separately. The current methods of evaluating eco-economic efficiency of the technology based on estimating soil carbon changes and methods of its recovery with adding organic fertilizers cannot be applied in practice now due to the lack of organic fertilizers and high costs of chemical analyses to measure soil carbon changes. The current study presents a new methodology to assess eco-economic effect of conservation agriculture practice based on assessing already adopted economic indicators and soil carbon changes dynamics (t CO2/ha/year) from specific agricultural practices with the subsequent estimation of carbon credit units that farmers can sell at a carbon market.