Welcome

We welcome you to the Conservation Agriculture Systems Institute (CASI) website. CASI brings together farmers, business leaders, public agency representatives, university and environmental group membership to chart long-term goals for sustainable agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley and to develop appropriate conservation agriculture production systems.

Conservation agriculture goals are met through the application of farming principles that have been documented and demonstrated by research and experience. These principles include:

Minimum soil disturbance
Preservation of residues that provide permanent soil cover
Diverse crop rotations
Use of cover crops
Integrated pest management
Reliance on precision, highly efficient irrigation
Controlled or limited mechanical traffic over agricultural soils

There are many potential benefits of conservation agriculture, including:

water conservation
dust suppression
reduced runoff

lower labor needs and costs
fuel savings
carbon sequestration

We welcome your participation and encourage your comments and inquiries.

Conservation agriculture news

Student honored for conservation ag research
Posted 2/6/2012 - Congratulations to Joy Hollingsworth, a first-year graduate student working with Dr. Anil Shrestha in the Department of Plant Science at CSU Fresno, for having been awarded the 2012 Student Paper and Poster Contest Award from the California Weed Science...

UC launches “Conservation Agriculture Systems Institute” Jan. 27
Posted 1/6/2012 - A diverse group of public and private sector agricultural professionals are joining the University of California to form the Conservation Agriculture Systems Institute (CASI), an organization that will be formally launched at a public meeting Jan. 27 in...

2011 CT farmers awarded
Posted 1/5/2012 - In 2005, the University of California and NRCS Conservation Tillage Workgroup established the Conservation Tillage Farmer Innovator Award as a means for providing greater visibility to CT pioneers in California. The criteria for this award are...

Conservation agriculture at work

Experimental field in which conservation tillage with and without cover crops are being compared to standard tillage systems.

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RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, will feed timely information about conservation agriculture systems directly to your web browser. Click the orange button to subscribe to the conservation tillage RSS feed.

Conservation tillage innovators

John Diener, the owner of Red Rock Ranch in Five Points, Calif., was named the 2010 CT Innovator by the Conservation Tillage and Cropping Systems Workgroup. He has been an articulate spokesperson for Central Valley agriculture over the years, and a demonstrated leader in a variety of civic, research and policy arenas.