Conservation Tillage Promises More Profitable and Sustainable Farms

sloped and degraded soils, erratic or low rainfall, poor market access, and high transport costs. To overcome these obstacles, they usually have to shift to more intensive agricultural pro-duction systems that raise productivity and reduce or reverse the need to expand their crop area. The challenge is to do this profitably while ensuring the sustainable use of land, soil, water, and other resources. As emphasized in the World Development Report 2008, strategies for turnaround in these areas involve two key inter-ventions. The first is to improve technologies for sustainable management of land, water, and biodiversity, and the second is to put local communities in the driver’s seat to manage nat-ural resources. Conservation farming—and particularly th