Importance

The adoption of CA can help improve the quality of soils, water systems, and air. Reduced soil erosion due to less exposure to both water runoff and wind, is a major benefit of the low soil disturbance and soil cover principles of CA.

The elimination of plowing costs, along with reductions in seed inputs decreases the cost of crop production. Even without any increase in production (which is sometimes the case), CA usually reduces costs and thereby increases profits. But when combined with the production increase discussed above, the net economic effect is significant. Of course other crops will also benefit from CA.

Productivity increases are common in well managed CA systems.  Yield increases of 12-20% were measured in wheat, barley, lentil and chickpea, when all principles of CA were employed along with early sowing in experiments over four years. A key step in achieving grain yield improvement is the successful establishment of the ZT crop.