Announcement
Why this conference?
Topics of discussion and schedule
Would you like to participate?
Please register

Announcement
The Land and Plant Nutrition Management Service (AGLL) and the Water Resources, Development and Management Service (AGLW) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are pleased to announce the International e-mail conference on "Drought Resistant Soils: Optimization of soil moisture for sustainable plant production" to be held from 15 November to 17 December 2004.

Why this conference?
This e-conference is designed to provide a platform to share experiences and discuss how farmers can minimize the impact of drought and respond adequately to water scarcity in rainfed agriculture through soil moisture management. A focus on smallholders in drought-prone environments is of particular interest, because water scarcity or poor rainwater management often leads to crop failure, economic hardship and food insecurity.

Topics of discussion and schedule
This e-conference will consider direct and indirect effects of agricultural practices on components of the water balance. The question is how to optimize soil moisture, which is a key parameter for drought-proofing the soil and increasing productivity in rainfed or irrigated agriculture while protecting water resources. To answer this question, the e-conference will focus successively on five individual topics according to the following schedule:

Participation
This conference is calling for a wide participation of field practitioners, NGOs, researchers, students, institutions and any person working in areas related to agronomy, environmental, social and economic sciences, and rural development. The participation of policy-makers working in these areas, from local to international levels, as well as farmers interested in this approach will also be very welcome.

4The conference will be held in English, so interventions and contributions should be submitted in that language where possible, though limited interventions will be accepted in Spanish and French such as available case studies. In that case, the e-conf team will summarise them.

4Participants can contribute to the dialogue or to analysis of the issues, or they can provide data, specific information or case studies dealing with the current topics of discussion.

4Each intervention should be provided as an email attachment in Times New Roman 12 font, saved in RTF (Rich Text Format), and should not exceed 400 words.The moderator of the conference will screen all messages on content and adherence to these rules, and may edit them for increased clarity and to avoid duplication.

Please register
We welcome your participation in this E-mail conference. Please send an e-mail to our mailing list server, leave the subject line blank and enter the following message in the text body: subscribe SoilMoisture-L

Once you have registered, you will receive an e-mail confirming your participation, along with an introductory text explaining how the conference works and how to sign off, as well as the e-mail address for sending your contributions.

Subsequently, you will be able to receive the interventions of other participants in your e-mail, except for those that were sent before you registered. However, all interventions will be available at the E-Forum on this website.

Please feel free to forward this announcement to any of your colleagues and acquaintances who may be interested in this conference.

Topics and propositions for discussion

Each topic is quickly introduced and a number of propositions are proposed to stimulate the discussion. Please mark "Topic X - Proposition Y" at the start of your intervention.

Topic 1: Causes and consequences of soil moisture scarcity

Water scarcity is a major constraint to rainfed agriculture. The effects of drought on crop production are aggravated because farmers do not have reliable methods to predict occasional droughts (owing to seasonal or inter-year variations in rainfall), nor appropriate means to optimise use of poorly distributed rainfall or deal with long-term droughts.

Rainfall predictions can help farmers to anticipate their actions: short-term (1-5 days) weather forecasts or seasonal predictions (1-3 months) based on statistical tools may be available. The former are often reliable, but not very useful for agriculture. The latter would be very useful, but are generally less reliable.

The perceived water scarcity, besides low or erratic rainfall, may be due to choices made by the farmer, e.g., of a crop or variety sensitive to water stress, or to inadequate management of available water from rainfall.

Inappropriate practices in a particular context can dramatically affect water resources management and soil moisture availability. No short-term action can improve the rainfall patterns and therefore major efforts should focus on improving agricultural practices and land use to make better use of the rainfall. This may include better rainwater capture and infiltration; the reduction of water losses through evaporation, runoff and deep percolation; water use efficiency improvement by choice of water-efficient crops or varieties and spatial and temporal arrangements (intercropping, rotations); and reduction of transpiration through weed control or windbreaks..

Propositions
1. Poor yields are related to an insufficiency of soil moisture rather than to an insufficiency of rainfall.

2. Conventional farming accelerates loss of soil moisture through reduced ability of the soil to capture, drain and store rainwater.

3. Soil moisture monitoring is a better decision-making tool for farmers than rainfall predictions and weather forecasts.

4. Disasters, like floods and landslides, but also the costs for road maintenance and water treatment would be minimized when rainwater infiltration and storage in agricultural soils can be maximized.

5. Farmers cannot cope with strong climatic trends and their consequences for agricultural practices, because their production systems are not flexible enough.

Topic 2. Creating drought resistant soil: technologies and impacts of improved soil moisture at field level

The sustainable use of natural resources, especially in the case of water and soil, greatly depends on control and respect for the existing natural processes and cycles. When rainfall lands on the soil surface, a fraction will infiltrate into the soil to replenish the soil water or flow through to recharge the groundwater. Another fraction may run off as overland flow and the remaining fraction will evaporate back into the atmosphere directly from unprotected soil surfaces and from plant leaves.

Soils differ in their capacity to absorb, retain and release water. This capacity depends on a broad range of factors such as soil texture, soil depth, soil architecture (physical structure including pores), organic matter content and biological activity. But it can be improved through appropriate soil management. For example, soil surface porosity is essential for rainwater infiltration and can be protected by a residue cover. It can also be enhanced through providing a conducive environment for soil biological activity such as earthworms that create burrows and channels. Soil surface roughness may be easily modified through crop residue management. In dry areas, where permanent vegetation is problematic, surface roughness is often enhanced through stone lines and structures such as pits or negarims.

In order to improve soil moisture management it is necessary to understand which are the most important factors influencing soil moisture; which are the practices that threaten, or that protect and improve this capacity; what are the impacts -economic, environmental, etc.- of their implementation (locally and downstream); and what are the requirements of the different improvements in terms of labour, investment, support, etc.

Propositions:

1. Restoration of soil porosity by mechanical means is less satisfactory than by biological means.

2. Runoff farming and water harvesting are practices that aim at concentrating rainfall water and favour local crop growth through more effective use of rainwater. However, they are restricted to specific conditions (environmental or socio economic) for their effectiveness in improving water use efficiency.

3. Soil moisture management practices and organic-matter decomposition processes impact heavily vegetal, animal and soil biodiversity.

4. Although, the principles that lead to good soil moisture management are not new, farmers do not widely apply them, mainly because adapted technologies are not developed by researchers.

5. "Good practices", like those limiting run off and favouring water infiltration, may have (directly or indirectly) negative environmental effects at on-farm level or watershed level.

Topic 3. Environmental consequences of drought resistant soil and improved soil moisture management

Appropriate crop and soil management systems can be adopted, adapted or developed, which will lead to better local water use efficiency, but other farmers or non agricultural water users may also have potentially conflicting? exigencies regarding natural resources.

Farmers and the agriculture sector are often criticized because of the negative environmental impact of their activities. This impact is partially caused by supposed inadequate management of the soil, which has led to environmental problems such as imbalances of the water cycle, inefficient rainwater use, pollution of land and water resources (and thus possible impacts on human health), soil degradation, loss of biodiversity and increased emissions of CO2 from the soil to the atmosphere. On the other hand, practices which maximise infiltration can also aggravate leaching of nitrogen and other plant nutrients as well as biocides out of the soil, threatening the quality of groundwater resources. As a matter of fact, any technical act realized by a farmer will produce local modifications in the local environmental parameters. The interlinking in space and time of all these modifications may modify the overall functioning of the watershed, in a lot of aspects (land use, landscapes, carbon sequestration, greenhouse gases production, organic and mineral balances, animal and vegetal biodiversity criteria as well as recharge of the water table and maintenance of the hydrological regime).

In topic 2, we considered some practices, and proposed scientific approaches to quantify their direct effects on local water balance modifications. We now propose to upscale (in time and space), to consider cumulative direct and indirect effects of practices suggested in topic 2, and to try to give a qualitative representation of possible interactions between several phenomena.

1. Local soil moisture management practices will only modify water redistribution towards rivers, aquifers, etc. at local scale.

2. The production of biomass for soil cover, as is recommended for local soil moisture management, will also have costs in terms of water use, and negatively influences the water balance.

3. Soil moisture management practices do not only influence the hydrologic regime but modify nutrient cycling and organic-matter decomposition processes as well.

4. Improved soil moisture management practices can have such an impact on the biodiversty of a soil that even where people thought that certain species were never there (re)appear after several years.

5. There is no holistic representation thinkable that could allow a real analysis of benefits (social, financial, biophysical, environmental) of the impact of soil moisture management practices.

Topic 4. Tools and technologies to support soil mositure monitoring

Practices that lead to adequate soil moisture management may have complex interactions with other components of the production system. As an example, zero-tillage or crop residue management make weed control more difficult, and require an integrated management of the full crop cycle (including variations in time and space through intercrops and rotations). Changes in soil moisture and soil temperature regimes also induce modifications in mineral nutrient availability, and thus, changes may also be needed in organic and inorganic fertilizer rates and application methods.

Adaptive and participatory research should produce suitable technically and ecologically integrated technologies that are sustainable and socio economically viable. Private sector, agroindustry, banks etc. may also participate and contribute to the establishment of sustainable cropping systems.

Information on the probable amount of water that will be available over the current season for production in rainfed agriculture would help farmers to reduce the risk of crop water stress, or even crop failure, as well as making better use of farm resources and facilitating the planning of farm operations. Such information could lead to major savings in time, labour, and use of inputs.

There is a variety of techniques for monitoring soil moisture. It may be predicted through integrated crop-water models that take into account inter alia farmer practices. It may also be measured or estimated through empirical or advanced technologies: feel and appearance of the soil, gravimetric measurements, soil moisture probe, capacitance probe, tensiometer, neutron probe, time domain reflectometry (TDR). Beyond the on-farm measurement or simulation technologies, the question is also who measures and/or who will run the simulation models. In this topic, please indicate the socioeconomic and biophysical context i.e type of farmers, farm scale, natural resources.

Proposition
1. Available equipment or technique are not adequate for on-farm measurement of plant-available soil water.

2. It is difficult to combine weather or seasonal forecasts and soil moisture measurements or predictions for better cropping system management.

3. The type of model for on-farm estimation of plant-available soil water does not secure reliable results.

4. Soil moisture monitoring needs trained people to measure or simulate and process the information

5. Measured (laboratory) or simulated concepts, variables or indicators are needed to generate information to support soil moisture monitoring

6. The short-term benefits and long-term externalities induced by good soil moisture management must be evaluated, discussed and published.

Topic 5. Conditions for adoption of drought-proofing practices by farmers

Any practices or systems to be recommended to farmers should be feasible and acceptable in the prevailing socio-economic conditions. For example, soil-crop residue management should be economically viable if it is to be recommended where livestock now uses a major part of crop residues.

Adaptation processes in agriculture involve technical and organisational innovations that are both collective and individual. In considering and adapting to technical change, farmers and all concerned stakeholders have to make decisions and act. This requires:

- Engaging in the change process, by considering formal (rules, public policies) or informal (professional networks, collective actions) social processes

- Designing methods to carry out multidisciplinary research in partnership with the actors of technical change to test and adapt techniques to local contexts.

- Building a common conceptual framework embracing adaptive management, technical change, learning and coordination.

Decision-makers will need to develop and maintain policies that facilitate the initiatives and respond to the needs and desires of local groups and land users, especially smallholders. The land users should be provided with, inter alia, relevant information on the benefits to be gained from good practices at farm, village and environmental levels. Contradictory policies, lack of technical support, inadequate infrastructure and access to markets, non-existent or inadequate communication channels between the different stakeholders would undermine the success of good initiatives.

The creation of an adequate policy framework is a necessary step for fostering the design and implementation of improved soil moisture management practices and more generally, adequate land management systems (crop-soil-water-labour...) that lead to economic benefits for the farmer as well as environmental benefits for the community. The first step might be to identify constraints and resolve conflicts, especially regarding the use of land, water and other natural resources. This requires proactive research with stakeholders in identifying opportunities including strengthening capacities for diagnosis, planning, management as well as participatory monitoring and impact assessment

1. Technology adoption and adaptation has only been successful in cases where adequate attention was paid to farmer's initiatives and their interactions on "products" released by research, extension services and private sector.

2. The implementation of improved soil moisture management systems will be hindered through legislation, incentives or subsidies by governments.

3. The main reason for farmers and communities not to implement appropriate soil moisture management is lack of information, education and training.

4. As there are alternatives to feed livestock, farmers do not really have to choose between using crop residues for soil cover or using them for feeding the cattle in arid regions.

5. In general, Conservation Agriculture is perceived as more profitible by farmers, while researchers and extensionists perceive it as more risky.