How should we handle crop stubble?

Everyone "knows" that good farming practice is to retain stubble for all the well-know reasons. Stubble will protect paddocks from wind and water erosion, help conserve valuable moisture, and recycle nutrients.

 
On the other hand, stubble can prevent effective herbicide activity, can harbour disease and perhaps insects, and more recently it has been shown that stubble can increase frost damage. Also of course, not all seeding machines can successfully plant seed into such stubble loads. For whatever of these reasons, the decision by the farmer over the road was to burn the stubble -

We have been debating these pros and cons for decades, and though stubble is being retained in a lot more paddocks, the decision is complex. In fact, you would wonder how a farmer can make a rational choice.
Sometimes a compromise is possible, which is reflected in this near-by paddock where stubble has been burned in strips, presumably where the weed seeds were channelled at harvest time.