Hear Janaki Fisher-Merritt from the Food Farm Wrenshall, MN) discuss how they have worked to incorporate cover crops in a diverse rotation with cover crop fallows, interseeding, and cut-and-carry mulching.
"It is a sign that creative solutions to the drought are possible and that everyone must make sacrifices, whether it's cutting back on watering our yards or laying some crops fallow," said Brian Stranko, director of the Nature Conservancy's water program.
Can we consider the length of the fallow period or the crop-fallow time ratios as good indicators for the sustainability of shifting cultivation, and is permanent agriculture only adopted beyond certain thresholds?
On the Canadian prairies, the tillage-based crop-fallow system has been replaced by no-till reduced input systems or tillage-based organic systems with more diversity in crop rotations but with no external inputs.
Previous models of shifting cultivation or crop-fallow rotations have described the fate of soil fertility and crop productivity for an average plot, as a function of intensity of land use, without explicit consideration of the scaling rules between plot and landscape.
In 1935, Roosevelt established the Soil Conservation Service: nesters rotated crops, fallowed land and built natural barriers, irrigation ponds and holding tanks.
We conducted seasonal trappings over 6-years in the main habitats (cereal and alfalfa crops, fallows, and their margins).
Tavy is managed in a short-fallow system (typically 1 3 to 1 7 crop to fallow years) with minimal attention during fallows (Laney 2002).
Data for German federal states indicate a strong variance in EFA decisions with an overall dominance of catch crops, nitrogen fixing crops and fallow land – two of which bear limited benefits for biodiversity conservation.
