Sustainable Soil Management Is More than What and How Crops Are Grown - Principles of Sustainable Soil Management in Agroecosystems - page 379

in the watershed, they reach a scale where environmental impact can be monitored
with suitable indicators to establish a system of payment for environmental services.
One of the partnerships established in the Cultivando Água Boa program and
developed through an agreement with the Brazilian No-Till Federation (FEBRAPDP)
is the Participatory Methodology for Conservation Agriculture Quality Assessment
(Laurent et al. 2011), based upon former positive experiences with catchment devel-
opment in Brazil. The first phase in the program is that the partners plan to measure
the impacts of farm management through a scoring system indicating how much
each farm is contributing to the improvements of the water conditions. (The system is
available online in Portuguese at http://plantio.hidroinformatica.org/ . ) In this regard,
a scoring index model for rating the quality of no-till systems has been devised. The
model relies on expert knowledge and is being applied to identify soil erosion and
land degradation risks arising from any weakness in the adopted CA practices, and
possible action needed to address the weakness (Roloff et al. 2011). Consolidating
this phase and adapting the principles established for the “water producer” by the
National Water Agency, the partners will assign values to ecosystem services gener-
ated from farms participating in the program (ANA 2011). Considering the polluter/
payer and provider/receiver principles set in the Brazilian Water Resources Policy,
farmers with good scores will be paid for their proactive action to deliver watershed
services once the Paraná Watershed Plan is established. This will be a new frame-
work for services provided by farmers as compensation for their proactive approach
to improve the reservoir water quality and reduce costs for electricity generation by
the Itaipú Dam.
14.7.3 S Pain : S oil c onServation in o live g roveS
Olive orchards are an important agroecosystem in the Mediterranean. Andalusia,
the southernmost region of Spain, is the main olive cultivation area in the world as it
produces a third of the world's olive oil, and around 1.5 Mha or 17% of the surface
area is covered with olive groves (Gomez et al. 2009a), which account for 60% of
the Spanish olive growing area. Historically, olive cropping has been concentrated
on hilly lands, where soil erosion happens to be a very severe and widespread prob-
lem. Locally, historical soil loss rates have been reported to reach up to 184 Mg ha −1
year −1 (Vanwalleghem et al. 2010). Erratic but high-intensity rainfall especially dur-
ing winter, but also the management of the orchards, lies at the origin of soil erosion.
Commercial olive orchards, mainly grown under rainfed conditions, are character-
ized by extremely adverse management conditions as farmers tend to till intensively
to avoid competition of weeds with tree water and nutrient uptake. Therefore, simple
conservation strategies, such as no-till with natural vegetation or the establishment
of cover crops, are not easily adopted by farmers. Conventional tillage has been the
dominant management system in olive orchards over the last decades. The combina-
tion of this human-induced low vegetation cover with the steep slope gradients on
which these orchards are located, together with the high-intensity rainfall events that
characterize the Mediterranean climate, explains why high soil erosion rates have
been associated with olive oil production (Beaufoy 2001).