Agriculture and Environment: Wheat

Better Management Practices: Build Soil Fertility

In the face of expanding monocrop production year after year, traditional forms of soil conservation such as using fallows, integrated livestock into cropping systems, rotating crops, and using polyculture production systems are often abandoned.

This simplification of production practices tends to accelerate the degradation of the soil and the land resource base in general.

Fallowing, a prudent production practice
Forms of production that are more conserving or restoring of the soil can still be practiced if producers are convinced that they are economically viable. Fallowing (in which land is removed from wheat cultivation and left to pasture or growing soil building cover crops) provides a good example.

Most nutrient depletion occurs in the upper level of the soil where the roots of the wheat are concentrated. Enriched fallows of some seven years (where plantings are chosen to increase fertility) can build up soil fertility.

Legumes & deep-rooted cover crops
For example, legumes grown to fix nitrogen and deep-rooted cover crops to scavenge for native or leached potassium, phosphorous and other trace elements and pull them to the surface make it easier for short-rooted crops such as wheat to utilise the nutrients.

In addition to reducing the need for fertilisers, such extended fallows also increase the soil's organic matter tremendously and restore soil biodiversity and soil structure. These, too, have a positive impact on future production. Thus, fallowing is both a soil conservation and rejuvenation measure that can help to return soils to their former vitality.

Alternate sources of income
Fallowing also provides temporary habitats and increases foraging areas for wildlife. Many producers in developed countries have found that encouraging wildlife in such areas allows them to make money by selling hunting rights, mostly for game birds but also for some mammals.

Depending on the price of wheat, such hunting fees can represent 5-25% of net income. The major problem with this strategy, at least in the United States, is that most wheat-producing areas are located far from urban areas and few accommodations for hunters are available. By contrast, in developing countries, attracted wildlife can be an important source of protein for farm families.

Government-sponsored programs
Another possible strategy to reduce the financial impact of an extended fallow is through government-sponsored programs. In the United States, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) provides financial support for ten years. Producers can sign up part of their land for CRP to fallow those areas. Undertaking this approach on a partial basis would allow land to rotate into and out of production.

Even if this is not the intended use of the CRP or other subsidy programs, adapting it in this way could help restore productivity in large areas of wheat cultivation in the United States and other areas as well. In Brazil, a similar system that does not involve government support involves cropping for 3-5 years followed by the use of the same land for pasture for 7-10 years.

Unfortunately, agricultural credit and investment systems do not incorporate these features as regular measures for consideration. Fallowing and crop rotations are not seen by financial institutions as being good investments, even though they improve the resource base and reduce future costs for expensive fertilisers and pesticides.

In addition, many agricultural extension agents often do not understand the value of such systems and denigrate them to local farmers. This reality is gradually shifting, however, and soil and environmental rehabilitation strategies are increasingly seen as worthwhile investments.