Empowering & enabling farmers, especially community-based small scale farmers, to reduce input costs and soil degradation while increasing biodiversity in the soil and obtaining more consistent yields and higher profits, inter alia by adding value to crops and thereby diversifying outputs.

Eastern Cape Province, one of the provinces with the highest levels of unemployment and poverty in South Africa.  Extensively eroded and semi-arid.

The University of Fort Hare, extension workers in the provincial department of agriculture & some NGO’s, farmers and farmer organisations.

Subsidies and handouts by politicians intent primarily on short-term personal benefits (e.g. votes), as well as erratic and usually extremely delayed annual funding have been constant problems for the Thrust.

Politicians!

On-going process on the verge of collapse due to an absence of political lobbying and appreciation of the URGENT need for increasing soil biodiversity and decreasing and reversing erosion.

Essential to have medium- long-term funding guaranteed and effective political and intra-Departmental lobbying.

Conservation Agriculture is essentially the simultaneous application of three fundamental principles, viz. crop production with:

1. minimal soil disturbance (preferably Direct Seeding or Planting, popularly known as No Till or Zero Tillage, and more graphically described as Planting without Ploughing);
2. maximum soil cover (throughout the year  -  using crop residues together with the growing crop and sometimes Green Manure Cover Crops); and
3. multi-cropping (inter- or relay-cropping but preferably, to break pest and disease cycles, etc., crop rotation).

To these have more recently been added the integration of cropping and livestock production systems.

As such it can reduce and reverse soil degradation and increase profits, dramatically increasing the sustainability of especially crop production by farmers, both large and small.

Conservation agriculture aims at enhancing natural biological processes both above and below ground. It is based on three principles: minimum mechanical soil disturbance, permanent organic soil cover, and diversified crop rotations for annual crops and plant associations for perennial crops. By minimizing soil disturbance, CA creates a vertical macro-pore structure in the soil, which facilitates the infiltration of excess rainwater into the subsoil, improves the aeration of deeper soil layers, and facilitates root penetration.

Among key strategies to mitigate climate change, Conservation Agriculture (CA) is the only option and approach that:

• turns carbon sequestration into a profitable business for immediate private financial gain, thereby mitigating climate change by eradicating poverty;
• constitutes a mitigation strategy that applies to, and can be implemented by, seventy-five percent of the poor people in our world who depend on agriculture to survive;
• does not require immediate, massive front-loading investment with distant future pay-off, but which generates immediate and cumulative financial gain;
• does not expect or require immediate local action or investment to create future public goods, but generates public goods as a direct, but emerging consequence of private investment for personal gain;
• builds and leads to new carbon sequestration equilibriums and dynamic, system stabilizing processes that increases the inherent resilience of soils (one of the two major carbon sinks of our planet), to carbon buffeting.

In memoriam Richard Fowler