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Incorporation and Low-Till

This alternative requires that farmers have access to the appropriate machinery and fuel, as well as the capital to pay for it; but is often the least capital- and labor-intensive of all no-burn alternatives.  It also tends to find easier acceptance from farmers, as it simply involves omitting burning from field preparation.  In some cases (Russia), it is already widely known that incorporation is a better alternative to burning, and some burn only in years when an extremely good harvest makes the resulting stubble too thick to plow without risking breakage of equipment.  Provision of higher-quality steel plows is enough in these cases to halt burning entirely.

Choppers added to harvesting combines, dedicated choppers or simply tractors with improved plows can also better enable stubble to be incorporated into the soil.   Especially where soil has suffered from decades of burning and overuse, it also may be a necessity simply to restore the soil to a more fertile state, one with a higher humus content that requires less fertilizer and irrigation.

While it does increase humus content and thus moisture over time, incorporation (with its disturbance of soil structure) receives some criticism from conservation agriculture advocates as it does not carry as strong benefits for the soil as no-till, CA methods.  However, certain kinds of straw (especially rice straw, as noted above) might not decompose quickly enough to allow CA methods to work properly.  A similar situation arises with all kinds of crops in certain regions subject to freezing temperatures, where the roots left in CA simply do not have the time to decompose sufficiently (interestingly, at higher latitudes and altitudes where extremely cold temperatures persist, CA again becomes possible because the root structure is essentially destroyed in hard freezes).  In these cases, incorporation or alternate use may prove a more viable alternative to “pure” CA.