Conservation agriculture (CA) aims to achieve sustainable and profitable agriculture through the application of the three CA principles: minimal soil disturbance, permanent soil cover and crop rotations. CA holds tremendous potential for all sizes of farms and agro-ecological systems, but its adoption is perhaps most urgently required by smallholder farmers, especially those facing acute labour shortages. It is a way to combine profitable agricultural production with environmental concerns and sustainability and it has been proven to work in a variety of agroecological zones and farming systems.

It is because of this promise that FAO is actively involved in promoting CA, especially in developing and emerging economies. CA can only work optimally if the different technical areas are considered simultaneously in an integrated way. Therefore staff from several Divisions and Services of FAO took the initiative to create an informal workgroup consisting, in the beginning, of members from the Crop and Grassland Service AGPC, the Land and Plant Nutrition Management Service - AGLL; Animal Production Service - AGAP, and Agricultural and Food Engineering Technologies Service - AGST, (formerly AGSE). It is understood that the multidisciplinary nature of CA will always require the rich mix of expertise available to FAO as it works to promote the CA concept worldwide.

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