CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Future human needs for food and fiber should be fulfilled mainly through the agricultural intensification on the actual cultivated land, pursuing an economically viable, socially acceptable and environmentally sustainable system. The objectives of this review are to: i) briefly describe the actual cropping systems of the Argentinean Pampas, ii) discuss the reliability of cropping system intensification practices and to, iii) analyze the extent of the improvement in the use of water and solar radiation by incorporating cropping system intensification practices in the Argentinean Pampas. Current cropping systems in the Argentinean Pampas largely rely on summer crops, including soybean as the most widespread crop. The unbalanced cropping sequence of the Pampas has several aspects that threat their sustainability and efficiency. Sustainable intensification of agriculture in the Argentinean Pampas rely on a more intense use of cultivated land and environmental resources, such as rainfall and solar radiation, using an appropriate set of agronomic practices aiming to higher grain production focused on environmental concern. Since there is little scope for further increase in resource capture and use in the typically well managed single crops of the Pampas, the improvements will be strongly associated with higher levels of intensification, cultivating crops more frequently than before, and using the available resources during the winter season. Increases in water and radiation use efficiency would, however, be more related to the inclusion of more efficient crops involved in the sequence. Owing the north to south decreasing gradient of the length of growing season in the Argentinean Pampas, the choice of the more adequate cropping strategy to sequence intensification can be quite different.

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