BARI (Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute) is the largest multi-crop research institute in Bangladesh. One of the mission of the institute is to develop environmental friendly conservation agriculture technology for sustainable crop production to enhance soil health. Conservation agriculture (CA) is a farming system that promotes minimum soil disturbance, maintenance of crop residue or cover crop and diversified crop rotation. It enhances biodiversity and natural biological processes above and under the soil surface, which enhances to increase water and nutrient use efficiency without sacrificing the crop yield. One of component of CA is appropriate and sustainable mechanization. Sustainable mechanization is the technical, economic, social, environment and cultural aspects which contribute to the sustainable development of the food and feed.
BARI has been working on CA since nineties. Then CA was concentrated mostly in wheat research and demonstrated in the northern part of Bangladesh with the collaboration of CIMMYT. BARI is the pioneer of CA in Bangladesh. Later on CA was practiced for other crops like, maize, pulses and oilseeds. BARI developed power tiller operated several small CA machines suitable for fragmented land of Bangladesh. These CA machines are BARI Seeder (PTOS), BARI Bed Planter, BARI Zero Till Planter, etc.
Bangladesh agriculture is dominated by intensive crop culture, grow one crop after another for feed the huge population. Therefore, the practice of CA may be different from low intensive agriculture. To get benefit from CA is it should be practiced year after year in the same land. To develop CA technology for intensive crop culture for long time a CA park has been established in 2021 in BARI premise with the collaboration of Bangladesh Agricultural University through ASMIH-Bangladesh project phase 2 with financial supports of BARI and USAID. Long term CA research will be conducted here and researchers, academia, farmers and entrepreneurs can visit and observe the benefits of CA practices. This will enhance the dissemination of CA technologies in farm levels and thus adopt sustainable crop production and soil management systems in the country.