Sustainable Farming

Sustainable farming for a plant-based food system

Plant-Based Health Professionals UK call for a rapid, global transition to a plant-based food system involving sustainable agricultural land use aligned to meeting human and planetary health needs. This will not only serve to improve human health but is necessary to prevent further destruction of the planet and to start healing and regenerating the Earth’s ecosystems including soils, landscapes, hydrology, atmosphere, sea, vegetations and biodiversity and wildlife habitats. Intensive and extensive animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined and is a major driver of climate change, water pollution, land and watershed degradation, flooding, loss of wildlife and biodiversity, deforestation and ocean destruction.

Our current predominate tillage-based crop agriculture is also not fit for purpose and is causing widespread land and environmental degradation, runoff, soil erosion, and flooding, and is not climate-smart. This has led to higher production costs, lower farm productivity and profit, sub-optimal yield ceilings, and poor efficiency and resilience. Tillage-based agriculture has also led to dysfunctional ecosystems and degraded ecosystem services such as water, carbon, nutrient cycling, suboptimal water provisioning and regulatory water services with high environmental costs to society and nutritionally lower quality food.

The solutions to all these problems are provided by agricultural land use based on no-till Conservation Agriculture, which is an ecological approach to regenerative sustainable agriculture and ecosystem management based upon the context specific application of three interlinked principles of ecological health, productivity, sustainability and resilience of agricultural resource base, namely:

Principle 1: Continuous minimum or no mechanical soil disturbance.

Implemented by the practice of no-till seeding or broadcasting of crop seeds and direct placing of planting material into untilled soil; no-till weeding; minimum or no soil disturbance from any cultural operation, harvest operation, or farm traffic. Sowing seed or planting crops directly into untilled soil and no-till weeding reduces runoff and soil erosion; minimises the loss of soil organic matter through oxidation; reduces disruptive mechanical cutting and smearing of pressure faces; promotes soil microbiological processes; protects and builds soil structure and connected pores; avoids impairing movement of gases and water through the soil; and promotes overall soil health and ecosystem functions.

Principle 2: Maintaining a permanent biomass mulch cover on the soil surface.

Implemented by retaining crop biomass, rootstocks, stubbles and biomass from cover crops and other sources of biomass from ex-situ sources. Use of crop biomass (including rootstocks and stubbles) and cover crops reduces runoff and soil erosion; protects the soil surface; conserves water and nutrients; supplies organic matter  and carbon to the soil system which feeds all soil life; promotes soil mesofauna activity including earthworms to incorporate surface biomass into the soil; promotes soil microbiological and fungal activity to enhance and maintain soil health including structure and aggregate stability (resulting from glomalin production by mycorrhiza and other fungi); contributes to integrated weed, insect pest, and pathogen management and to integrated nutrient and water management; and promotes overall soil health and ecosystem functions.

Principle 3: Diversification of species in the cropping system.

Implemented by adopting a cropping system with crops in rotations, and/or sequences and/or associations involving annuals and perennial crops, including a balanced mix of legume and non-legume crops and cover crops. Crops can include annuals, short-term perennials, trees, shrubs, nitrogen-fixing legumes, and grasses, as appropriate. Use of diversified cropping systems contributes to diversity in rooting morphology and root compositions; enhances microbiological activity; enhances crop nutrition and crop protection through the suppression of pathogens, diseases, insect pests, and weeds; and builds up soil organic matter; and promotes overall soil health and ecosystem functions.

These universally applicable core principles and practices go hand in hand with other complementary Good Agricultural Practices, including integrated crop, soil, nutrient, water, pest and  energy management. Conservation Agriculture is a combination of resource conserving and regenerating practices simultaneously creating synergies between them to regenerate soil and landscape health and functions to optimise sustainable production.

Conservation Agriculture does not require any inputs from farmed animals as the healthy soil and its components are self-sustaining without the need for animal grazing and manure. Biomass is incorporated directly into soils by soil biodiversity, particularly earthworms and further processed by soil bacteria and fungi. Conservation Agriculture also requires much reduced inputs of chemicals and fossil fuel than tillage-based agriculture and it is entirely possible to practice within organic farming systems. Conservation Agriculture offers many productivity, economic, environmental and social benefits including: higher and stable production and profit, control of run-off, erosion and land degradation, greater quantities of clean water, enhanced climate change adaptability and mitigation, improved water cycling and reduced risks of flooding, and rehabilitation of degraded lands, biodiversity and ecosystem functions.

Conservation Agriculture systems are present in all continents, involving all land-based production systems — rainfed and irrigated systems including annual cropland systems, perennial systems, mixed annual-perennial systems, orchards and plantation systems, agroforestry, organic and non-organic systems, rice-based systems etc. Conservation Agriculture systems perform well with traditional seeds or modern seeds and operate regeneratively at multiple levels to optimally harness a range of productivity, economic, environmental, and social benefits as well as address local and global concerns related to food and water security, climate change, land degradation, biodiversity and smallholder agricultural development. It is the best example of a multi-functional agricultural land use system. Organic Agriculture systems and Regenerative Agriculture systems are Conservation Agriculture systems when they are based on the three interlinked principles of Conservation Agriculture.

Learn more about farming without animals by reading this open access book chapter by Amir Kassam and Laila Kassam (2024) – Regenerative farming without farmed animals.

To learn more about Conservation Agriculture you can watch this webinar delivered by Professor Amir Kassam on 24th June 2020.

Professor Amir Kassam is Visiting Professor in the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, University of Reading, UK. For many years he has been involved in the global transformation of the conventional degrading tillage agriculture to sustainable agriculture based on no-till Conservation Agriculture. He is the Moderator of the Global Conservation Agriculture Community of Practice (CA-CoP) Platform and has worked with a number of international and national organisations around the world on sustainable agriculture. He has published widely on the science, practice and  benefits of Conservation Agriculture, which in 2018/19 was practiced by smallholders and larger-scale farmers in all land-based agroecology’s on more than 205 million hectares of global cropland in more than 100 countries. The spread of Conservation Agriculture is equally divided between the Global North and the Global South, and it is expanding worldwide at an annual rate of some 10 million hectares.

Amir was awarded the OBE in 2005 for services to tropical agriculture and to rural development. Born in Zanzibar, Amir has a BSc (Hons) in Agricultural Science and a PhD in Agricultural Ecology from the University of Reading, and an MS in Irrigation Science from the University of California, Davis. Amir is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, and former chair of the Tropical Agriculture Association UK, the Aga Khan Foundation (UK) and the FOCUS Humanitarian Assistance Europe Foundation. He is a former Senior Agricultural Research Officer in the CGIAR Technical Advisory Committee Secretariat and the CGIAR Science Council at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Deputy Director General (Programme) of the West Africa Rice Development Association (AfricaRice), Ivory Coast.

Anyone wishing to subscribe to the Global CA-CoP platform should contact Amir at: amirkassam786@googlemail.com