Climate Smart Farming Practices, Constraint, Technology And All You Need To Know
As demand for food increases day-by-day globally due to growing global population and changing diets, it’s time to adopt Climate Smart Farming also known as Climate Smart Agriculture.
Production is struggling to keep up as crop yields level off in many parts of the world, ocean health declines, and natural resources.
NAgro gathered that the challenge agriculture is facing is intensified by extreme vulnerability to climate change. Climate change’s negative impacts are already being felt, in the form of increasing temperatures, weather variability, shifting agroecosystemig boundaries, invasive crops and pests, and more frequent extreme weather events.
Before we go further, let’s understand what Climate Smart Farming is all about
What is Climate Smart Farming/Agriculture
Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is agriculture that increases productivity, improves resilience, and mitigates climate change.
According to World Bank Group, Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an integrated approach to managing landscapes—cropland, livestock, forests and fisheries—that addresses the interlinked challenges of food security and accelerating climate change. CSA aims to simultaneously achieve three outcomes:
1. Increased productivity: Produce more and better food to improve nutrition security and boost incomes, especially of 75 percent of the world’s poor who live in rural areas and mainly rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.
2. Enhanced resilience: Reduce vulnerability to drought, pests, diseases and other climate-related risks and shocks; and improve capacity to adapt and grow in the face of longer-term stresses like shortened seasons and erratic weather patterns.
3. Reduced emissions: Pursue lower emissions for each calorie or kilo of food produced, avoid deforestation from agriculture and identify ways to absorb carbon out of the atmosphere.
Climate-smart Crop Production Practices and Technologies
1. Use of quality seeds and planting materials of well-adapted crops and varieties
An indispensable input for climate-smart crop production is quality seeds and planting materials of well-adapted varieties. It is impossible to harvest good crops with bad seeds, so you have to start by planting good seeds.
2. Integrated Pest Management
Climate change will affect the spread and establishment of a wide range of insect pests, diseases and weeds. This phenomenon will be in large part a consequence of changes in the distribution and health of naturally occurring host plants and crops, natural enemies, and the adaptive changes in farm management
3. Improved water use and management
Where water is a limiting factor, improving water management can be achieved through measures that conserve soil and water; and/or with deficit irrigation that can maximize crop yields per volume of water applied; and/or more efficient irrigation technologies that can reduce unproductive evaporation losses.
4. Sustainable soil and land management for increased crop productivity
At the field level, increasing productivity allows to grow more from the land already under production. This eliminates the need to open new land for agriculture and helps reduce the emissions associated with agricultural expansion.
5. Sustainable mechanization
The availability of appropriate machinery to carry out sustainable crop management practices increases productivity per unit of land. It also increases efficiency in the various production and processing operations and in the production.
Benefits Of Climate Smart Agriculture
1. CSA addresses food security, misdistribution and malnutrition
Despite the attention paid to agricultural development and food security over the past decades, there are still about 800 million undernourished and 1 billion malnourished people in the world.
2. CSA addresses the relationship between agriculture and poverty
Agriculture continues to be the main source of food, employment and income for many people living in developing countries. Indeed, it is estimated that about 75% of the world’s poor live in rural areas, with agriculture being their most important income source.
3. CSA addresses the relation between climate change and agriculture
Climate change is already increasing average temperatures around the globe and, in the future, temperatures are projected to be not only hotter but more volatile too. This, in turn, will alter how much precipitation falls, where and when. Combined, these changes will increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as hurricanes
The foundation of a resilient food system is a sustainable and healthy diet. No agricultural system can be climate-smart enough to feed the world with a climate-crazy diet.