This improves the quality of surface water reducing pollution from soil erosion, and enhances groundwater resources. In many areas it has been observed after some years of conservation farming that natural springs that had disappeared long time ago started to flow again. The potential effect of a massive adoption of conservation farming on global water balances is not yet fully recognized. The system depends on biological processes to work and thus it enhances the biodiversity in an agricultural production system on a micro- as well as macro level including flora and fauna. Conservation agriculture is by no means a low output agriculture and allows yields comparable with modern intensive agriculture but in a sustainable way.
Yields tend to increase over the years with yield variations decreasing.
For the farmer, conservation farming is mostly attractive because it allows a reduction of the production costs, reduction of time and labour, particularly in peak times like planting and it reduces in mechanized systems the costs for investment and maintenance of machinery in the long term. Disadvantages in the short term might be initially high costs of specialized planting equipment and the completely new dynamics of a conservation farming systems, requiring high management skills and a learning process by the farmer. Long term experience with conservation farming all over the world has shown that conservation farming does not present more or less but different problems to a farmer, none of them not to be resolvable. Particularly in Brazil the area under conservation farming is now growing exponentially and is in Brazil reaching the 10 Mill. Also in North America the concept is widely adopted.