5. CONCLUSION
The impacts of policies and plans established at the national and
regional level by the Brazilian government and the efforts of public and
private institutions to bring farmers to use the practices for
controlling soil erosion and toward the massive adoption of ZT/CA and
iCLF-CA management systems under conservation agriculture in Brazil,
allow to forecast the following advances:
- Reinsertion of areas of degraded pastures into a sustainable
agricultural production system. This will promote significant increase
in agricultural production and other ecosystem services, while
preventing soil erosion increase to a larger extent and avoiding the
deforestation of new areas for agricultural production.
- For the year 2020, the positive economic impact of system ZT/CA and
iCLF-CA in preventing water erosion is estimated in 2.3 billion US
dollars for Brazilian farmers.
- The updating of the National Soil and Water Conservation Program, in
progress, will increase the use of conservation practices and
technologies for attending different needs of the farmers.
- The information from PronaSolos Program will, in the first four years
(2021-2024), increase the quality of soil data available not only to
scientists but to farmers and decision makers in Brazil. This
information will make ZT/CA and iCLF-CA management systems even more
efficient in controlling soil loss by water erosion and land
degradation.
All these efforts are a result of the determination of farmers,
extensionists, technical consultants, agricultural researchers and
professors and private organizations, in promoting soil erosion control
practices in an extensive area of Brazil. The success of plans and
policies which allowed the adoption of practices and technologies based
on ZT/CA and iCLF principles, if maintained in a conservative scenario,
may reach to 60 million of hectares of agriculture land by the year
2025. In the process, the Brazilian agriculture will become one of the
most sustainable in the world.