Ecological approaches to ensuring food security : a learning platform for understanding and advancing conservation agriculture in Africa and Asia; final report

The aim is to embrace and promote agroecological systems in smallholder agricultural production with conservation agriculture (CA) as a starting point, and to better understand limitations for scaling up CA among small-holder farmers. In this detailed report the problem of mulch limitation was identified. A larger survey showed that when farmers expand their CA fields to include larger portions of their farms, the level of herbicide and fertilizer inputs increases. The agroecological platform to this research, in collaboration with farmers, shows that adding legumes to the CA systems increased total food production without reducing maize yield