Chief Guest Editor
Tika Bahadur Karki
Nepal Agricultural Research Council, National Maize Research Program, Rampur, Chitwan, Nepal
Email: tbkarki2003@gmail.com
Guest Editor
Jiban Shrestha
Nepal Agricultural Research Council, National Maize Research Program, Rampur, Chitwan, Nepal
Email: jibshrestha@yahoo.com
Mahendra Prasad Tripathi
Nepal Agricultural Research Council, National Maize Research Program, Rampur, Chitwan, Nepal
Email: mptripathi@gmail.com
Traditional soil cultivation systems, with intensive soil tillage, will generally lead to soil degradation and loss of crop productivity. World-wide the focus has shifted to conservation agriculture (CA). CA is characterized by three linked principles, namely: continuous minimum mechanical soil disturbance, permanent organic soil cover and diversification of crop species grown in sequences and/or associations. Conservation Agriculture maintains a permanent or semi-permanent organic soil cover. This can be a growing crop or dead mulch. Its function is to protect the soil physically from sun, rain and wind and to feed soil biota. The soil micro-organisms and soil fauna take over the tillage function and soil nutrient balancing. Mechanical tillage disturbs this process. Therefore, zero or minimum tillage and direct seeding are important elements of CA. Thus, CA aims to conserve, improve and make more efficient use of natural resources through integrated management of available soil, water and biological resources combined with external inputs. It contributes to environmental conservation as well as to enhanced and sustained agricultural production. It can also be referred to as resource-efficient / resource effective agriculture. CA is being practiced on about 45 million ha, mostly in South and North America. Its use is growing exponentially on small and large farms in South America, due to economic and environmental pressures. However, its area is increasing at a very slow rate across the globe especially among the smallholder farmers of developing countries. Increasing labor scarcity, declining soil’s productivity, declining biodiversity, climate change effects, low integration of crop-livestock-fisheries in agriculture and increasing cost of cultivation are the major constraints of present day agriculture. Therefore, the present topic was chosen to share the generated knowledge among the scientific communities and disseminate it among the smallholder farmers of developing countries.
Import Dates & Submit
Important dates
Submission Deadline: October 25, 2014
Notification of Acceptance: November 05, 2014
Final Version Due: November 30, 2014
Special Issue Publishing Date: December, 2015
Submit your article now
Manuscripts should be submitted as an attached file to an e-mail directed to the Chief Guest Editor, Tika Bahadur Karki at the address: <tbkarki2003@gmail.com>