Sustainable agricultural practices such as conservation agriculture have been promoted in southern Africa for nearly three decades, but their adoption remains low. It is of policy interest to unpack behavioural drivers of adoption to understand why …
There is an urgent need for agricultural development strategies that reconcile agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. This is especially true in the Global South where population growth is rapid and much of the world's remaining …
Conservation agriculture (CA) systems represent a set of three soil management principles: minimarbance, permanent soil cover and crop rotations - whereas the CA-based systems in this study add the bed and furrow tillage techniques as integral …
This paper reviews agricultural mechanization and reduced tillage use in the context of sustainable intensification in developing country agriculture. The scoping review includes selected and contrasting cases - including Zimbabwe (manual systems), …
Conservation agriculture (CA) 'the simultaneous application of minimum soil disturbance, crop residue retention, and crop diversification' is a key approach to address declining soil fertility and the adverse effects of climate change in southern …
Conservation agriculture (CA) is widely promoted in sub-Saharan Africa both in open fields and in agroforestry where the practice is known as 'conservation agriculture with trees' (CAWT). Although advantages and disadvantages of CA are well studied …
A major problem faced by small-scale farmers in northern Ethiopia is reduced crop yield due to increasing soil degradation resulting from repeated tillage and inadequate agronomic management practices. These practices have left soils and rainfed …
Long-term in situ soil and water conservation experiments are rare in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Eastern Africa. A long-term experiment was conducted (2005-2013) on a Vertisol to quantify the impacts of resource-conserving agriculture (RCA) …
It is remarkable that despite wide-ranging, in-depth studies over many years, almost no conservation agriculture (CA) studies consider gender and gender relations as a potential explanatory factor for (low) adoption rates. This is important because …
Since the paper by Giller et al. (2009), the debate surrounding the suitability of conservation agriculture (CA) for African smallholders has remained polarized between proponents and opponents. The debate also gave rise to a few studies that …