Introduction to the Special Issue on Conservation Agriculture in South Africa

Abstract

Conservation Agriculture (CA) as a pathway towards sustainable agriculture has gained a firm foothold in South Africa over the last decade, as is evident from reported adoption rates and the interest it attracts in farmers’ organisations and media. Globally, CA practices have been widely adopted in the Americas and Australia on large farms. The drivers of adoption and impacts of CA practices on sustainability indicators have been relatively well documented for these regions. Benefits from CA relate to ease of crop management, energy, cost and time savings, and soil and water conservation (Giller et al. 2015). In Africa, research on and promotion of CA practices have mostly taken place in smallholder environments with rather mixed results in terms of adoption and impacts on soil and water conservation, though there is emerging evidence that CA benefits farmers in regions that are prone to erratic rainfall (Stevenson et al. 2014). As the agricultural landscape in South Africa is highly diverse and rather different from the rest of the continent, the research experiences and lessons learned with CA in South Africa make up an interesting case study. South Africa harbours large-scale, technologically advanced crop farms that are often located in semi-arid regions with erratic rainfall. This suggests that the adoption of CA practices in South Africa, with all its adaptations to the farmers’ unique circumstances, can nevertheless be regarded as aligned with developments in Australia and the Americas. In addition, soil conservation approaches in South Africa are applied in systems other than rainfed annual crop production, such as irrigated cropping systems, orchards and mixed crop-livestock systems, in a flexible and non-dogmatic manner. Furthermore, South Africa harbours large numbers of mediumand small-scale crop farmers who are highly limited in their access to technologies and ability to apply technologies. Thus, the implementation of CA and related practices in South Africa occurs in diverse biophysical and socio-economic environments and in different types of production systems. This special issue aims to bring together available knowledge and experiences with CA in South Africa from different systems and disciplines. A CA workshop organised in Bloemfontein in 2019 was the starting point for the development of this special issue. In this issue, Swanepoel (2021) provides an integrated discussion of the various contributions leading to the development of a research agenda around the key themes of CA in South Africa and the question of how CA approaches can contribute to sustainable intensification. This is followed by focused contributions in the fields of annual crop production, orchards and vineyards, irrigated agriculture, soil fertility management, soil surveying and weed control. I would like to thank all the authors for their contributions to this special issue, and in particular Dr Cobus Botha, who has both coordinated it and served as a guest editor.