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Entire article below quote from Paulo Prado
In a joint study published last year, the U.S. Agricultural Research Service and researchers at Auburn University in Alabama said that no-till methods raised average annual cotton production on experimental plots in eastern Alabama by as much as 324 pounds an acre, or nearly 15 percent, over a three-year period.
CABECEIRAS, Brazil When Albino Ampessan bought a farm here in 1982, the land still bore the scrubby bushes, gnarled trees and wiry grasses typical of Brazil's vast central savannas.
Migrating from the more fertile, more crowded south of the country, he was undeterred by the rugged terrain, purchasing 620 acres, or 250 hectares, and planting soybeans with the help of his three sons. The area was historically considered unproductive. About two hours outside Brasília, the farm and surrounding savannas were thought to be useful only for grazing cattle.
Then the wet season came, flooding much of his first crop. Subsequent years brought more rain, time and again washing away topsoil, seedlings and most of the new farm's promise.
"We lost a lot," says Ampessan, now 77. "We had to try something new."
So the Ampessans turned farming on its head. Instead of plowing before each planting, they leveled the previous crop, let the residue decompose and seeded the following year's crop directly in the mulchy remains.
The runoff stopped, and within a decade the farm had a layer of topsoil that "now grows whatever you plant," said Ampessan. Whereas the land initially produced 1,870 pounds, or 850 kilograms, of soybeans an acre, the farm - now 12,000 acres - last year produced 3,470 pounds of soybeans an acre, plus other crops including corn, sunflowers and pineapples.
The Ampessans were pioneers in Brazil of no-till farming, a practice increasingly used worldwide to fight erosion and enhance soil fertility. First developed by American scientists in the 1960s, the technique, also known as conservation tillage, has taken root here faster than in any other country and has helped Brazilian farmers become some of the most productive, competitive exporters in the world.
While there were some five million acres of no-till farmland in Brazil in 1992, by the end of 2004 more than 54 million acres, or half the country's farmland, was no-till, according to the Brazilian No-Tillage Federation, in the southern city of Ponta Grossa. The no-till methods, along with genetically modified seed, transformed the Cerrado region here into the breadbasket of Brazil, responsible for half the country's soybean production and a third of its corn.
"Conservation tillage is helping Brazil conquer the world market," said Wayne Reeves, research leader at the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in Watkinsville, Georgia. "They copied it from the U.S., but did it bigger and better."
The technique spread just as advances in plant genetics were allowing tropical growers to cultivate crops, like soybeans, that once grew only in temperate climates. A drop in the value of the real, Brazil's currency, over the past decade made exports cheaper. Together, the factors made Brazil the largest exporter of sugar, beef and orange juice in the world, and the second-largest exporter of soybeans after the United States.
Traditionally, farmers till land to kill weeds and make soil crumble. But plowed dirt can wash or blow away. Tilling also exposes lower layers of earth to sunlight, evaporating moisture and burning nutrients.
As herbicides grew cheaper and less dangerous, many agronomists began urging farmers to forgo tilling altogether. "It's radical to throw your plow out the window, but it does wonders," said John Landers, an English agronomist who works in a no-till group in Brasília and who helped introduce no-till farming to the country.
The practice is growing quickly worldwide. Farmers in Argentina and Paraguay have begun following Brazil's lead. In Western Australia - the country's biggest, but one of its driest, states - conservation tillage increased wheat and barley production so much that the practice grew to cover 92 percent of the state's farmland over the past decade, according to Rolf Derpsch, a German agronomist recently hired by Australian growers to study their farms.
Adoption in the United States has been slower. Though many farmers in the Great Plains use no-till planting - overplowing and drought created the Dust Bowl of the 1930s - other growers have been reluctant to alter conventional methods. No-till plots now account for 23 percent of U.S. farmland, according to the Conservation Technology Information Center in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Yet studies in the United States indicate that conservation tillage could raise crop yields even in regions like the Southeast, where plowing has traditionally been deemed a must. In a joint study published last year, the U.S. Agricultural Research Service and researchers at Auburn University in Alabama said that no-till methods raised average annual cotton production on experimental plots in eastern Alabama by as much as 324 pounds an acre, or nearly 15 percent, over a three-year period.
One reason American farmers remain slow to adopt the practice, scientists say, is that government subsidies make them indifferent to the growing competitive advantage it lends foreign producers. Compared with Brazilian farmers, who compete on the world market with little or no state support, American growers this year are expected to receive $19.5 billion in government subsidies, nearly twice as much as in 2004, according to the Agriculture Department.
"There's a lack of economic incentive," says Ardell Halvorson, a soil scientist at the Agricultural Research Service's Soil Plant Nutrient Research Unit in Fort Collins, Colorado. "Without grants, it would have spread more."
Those who switch from conventional farming say the practice allays many concerns raised by environmentalists. For one, the amount of chemicals used in conventional and no-till farming is roughly the same. And the crop residue on the topsoil, scientists say, keeps the earth moist and fertile. More fertile soil means more efficient use of other chemicals, like fertilizers, and less demand for more farmland, scientists say.
"Much of the forest already cut would not have been had the know-how existed earlier to improve productivity in other parts of Brazil," said Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for research in agronomy that helped increase the global food supply, by phone from his office in Mexico
