Yearly Archives: 2015

Rethinking trees in Kansas agriculture

By in Blog on

unnamed

In the history of Kansas agriculture, trees have something of a checkered past. From initial legislative efforts to expand tree cultivation through the payment of generous bounties to today’s wholesale eradication of windbreaks and hedgerows, the importance, and value, of trees has shifted due to economic, ecological and climatological trends.

Those same trends are now putting trees in a new light through the practice of agroforestry, an intensive integration of trees and shrubs into agricultural systems. But for successful-and profitable-integration, landowners must rethink trees as essential components rather than optional or undesirable. In short, trees have to provide tangible benefits.

“We need to put working trees back on the farm,” said Gene Garrett, University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry. “They’re there for a purpose. Trees are crops, just like hogs and cattle, and farmers should be thinking of them as having value.”

Garrett, along with other local and internationally-recognized experts on agroforestry practices, spoke on the subject at a two-day workshop in Topeka on May 20-21. The workshop was sponsored by the Kansas Farmers Union, the Kansas Forest Service and other partners.

At the time of Kansas’ statehood in 1861, trees were a scarce commodity. Settlement depended on wood for building settlements, bridges, railroads-infrastructure for an expanding civilization-but with only 4.5 million acres of forest available, demand far outstripped supply. One solution was to enact bounties rewarding farmers to plant trees. The first bounty, fifty cents per acre for planting and cultivating trees, was offered in 1865, and increased three years later to two dollars per acre, as well as additional bounties for creating windbreaks along public roads. In 1873 the legislature upped the ante by offering 160 acres of land in return for planting 40 acres of trees.

“Kansans like trees,” said Larry Biles, State Forester with the Kansas Forest Service. “We have a long history of trying to promote and grow trees across the state.”

Unfortunately, Kansans also have a long history of forgetting. Windbreaks and hedgerows planted in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl are being eradicated to provide more cropland, and trees, once so critical to frontier settlements, are often regarded as a type of weed.

“I’ve seen a lot of trees going out, but the decisions we make are driven by short-term policies or economic decisions,” said Rich Straight, Forest Service Lead Agroforester for the USDA’s National Agroforestry Center. “Not everyone is in favor of trees.”

In many ways, the problem is one of tradition and definition. In the traditional model, pastureland for livestock, cropland and forest are segregated into separate entities. But, Garrett said, we’d be remiss if we didn’t think of forests as agriculture. “It’s not going to go where it needs to go before we accept that,” he said. “There’s a clear distinction between what I’m defining and what we think of as traditional agriculture. I’m not talking about planting trees, I’m talking about specifically integrating trees.”

Garrett’s definition-the manipulation and utilization of biological and physical interactions among components to yield multiple harvestable products while providing numerous conservation and ecological benefits to the farm-is based on five fundamental practices: alley-cropping, silvopasture, riparian buffers, windbreaks and forest farming, what he called “the newest kid on the block.”

The practice is intensive rather than passive, the deliberate and intentional combination of elements working together. Proper site location, proper species, proper climate and proper maintenance are necessary for elements to work in conjunction with one another, Garrett said. Above all, proper planning is essential.

“When you talk about putting trees with crops, it sounds simple,” he said. “It isn’t, not at all. You have to understand the fundamental relationships between them.” The amount of shade falling on the understory, tree spacing, alley width, types of forage, surface root depth, and other factors play important roles in harmonic integration.

Click here for the full story

Regreening Africa could help stem the tide of migration

By in Blog on

maize..

European Union leaders have been wrestling in recent weeks with the surge of the “boat people,” tens of thousands of refugees from Africa and the Middle East crossing the Mediterranean in overloaded boats in the hopes of finding a better life. Many of these migrants died during the journey.

Refugees like the boat people are fleeing poverty and the loss of their livelihoods in the wake of political instability, conflicts and more deeply rooted issues like land degradation and food insecurity. While media reports have focused on the political crises, rural communities in the drylands of the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and Syria face crop failures linked to declining soil fertility and droughts.

As European leaders respond to the refugee crisis, it would be good to consider more than a military crackdown on migrant smugglers, increased surveillance of illegal migrants or allocation of additional resources for resettlement. The situation provides an opportunity to think deeply about what can be done to alleviate underlying, systemic problems of degraded land and food insecurity in the countries of origin. A new WRI report shows that a new “green revolution” in Africa could be a solution

Restoring Degraded Land to Improve Quality of Life

Awareness of the connections between degraded land and food insecurity, livelihood threats and climate change is growing—as is the support for solutions. The global Bonn Challenge aims to bring 150 million hectares (370 million acres) into restoration by 2020. The New York Declaration on Forests, signed in September 2014 during the Climate Summit in New York, pledges to restore 350 million hectares (865 million acres) of degraded forest land by 2030. The recent New Climate Economy report shows that restoring just 150 million hectares of degraded land by 2030 could feed 200 million people, raise $35-40 billion annually in farm incomes, strengthen climate resilience and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Click here for the full story

Can Africa afford to save its soils?

By in Blog on

Tanzania-terracing

On the fertilizer-starved continent of Africa, the discourses about soil fertility revolve around the availability of inorganic fertilizers, and how policy – subsidies, tariffs, markets – can be made to support their use.

Supporters say that poor farmers are not able to make investments in restoring degraded soils because it takes too long to see yield increases or benefit from soil improvement measures.  Poor farmers simply can’t wait that long to see results – they say.

But in degraded, low-input and low-output systems so prevalent across the continent, agro-ecological approaches, including principles of organic farming – if properly managed – can increase yields immediately and restore soils to support productive farming.

In celebration of the International Year of Soils, we asked a number of experts:

Is investing in inorganic fertilizers really a better option than restoring soils over the long-term using an agro-ecological approach?

Join the debate in the comments section below: Can poor farmers afford to invest in restoring degraded soils?

Deborah Bossio, International Center for Tropical Agriculture

Changing the hippy discourse

In part, the focus on inorganic fertilizers comes from a persistent debate during the 70’s and 80’s around organic agriculture in North America and Europe.  There was great concern then – as there is today – that organic farming, if practiced over large areas, would threaten food security. Yields from organic farming were always going to be lower, the discourse went. Only hippies, idealists – and the privileged few – could afford organic.

Yes – a shift from high-input, high-output conventional to organic farming on large-scale farms in California resulted in lower yields – at the beginning.  A long-term experiment was set up at University of California Davis in 1988 to figure out how to make the conventional-to-organic transition least painful, using crop rotations and nutrient management.

Now, decades later, this experiment is helping drought-stricken farmers in California battle water shortages by planting cover crops to improve infiltration and soil carbon (see blog here).

Since then, several global studies have explored the debate, with surprising results.  In 2007, a University of Michigan meta-review found that, in developed countries, yields were almost equal on organic and conventional farms.

More recently, Lauren Ponisio and colleagues at UC Berkeley, found organic yields 19% lower than conventional. But – these yield differences could be offset using agro-ecological practices such as crop rotation and multi-cropping. For crucial food security crops like beans, peas and lentils, there was no yield gap at all.

Yet in poorer countries, the entire yield gap phenomenon disappears. In 2006 Jules Pretty and colleagues, including from the International Water Management Institute, published a study demonstrating that agro-ecological farming interventions not only improved the supply of critical environmental services.

Stating the facts

In the 57 poor countries where the interventions were applied, across 37 million hectares of land, productivity increased on almost 13 million farms.The average crop yield increase was 79%. All crops showed water use efficiency gains,with the highest improvement in rainfed crops.

There’s more. Carbon sequestered on average amounted to 0.35 tons of carbon per hectare each year. More than 70% of farms that used pesticide slashed theiruse by 71% – yet their yields rose 42%.

In 2007, the Michigan study reiterated these results. They revealed that organic farming can yield three times more food on individual farms in developing countries than low-intensive methods on the same land.

The fact is low-input, low-output systems productivity is very low. Farmers in Tanzania may get less than 0.5 tons per hectare of maize on depleted soil – yet the potential is ten-fold that.  In these systems, intensification implies more local and organic inputs; more management – not less.

More than just organic chic

Another persistent narrative is that agro-ecological approaches are for only a few select farmers who can access premium prices for organic produce. Organic is a niche market. But this argument couples organic farming practices with organic produce marketing – implying that those who don’t get premium prices lose out. As the above shows, they don’t.

In a study by Niels Halberg, of International Centre for Research in Organic Food Systems (ICROFS), and the International Food Policy Institute (IFPRI) it was found that shifting to organic farming can lead to higher food security in low input, low yield areas where hunger is most severe, and may even increase regional food self- reliance. Exactly what is needed in sub-Saharan Africa.

Instead of focusing on fertilizer only – whether mineral or organic – the debate should focus on supporting poor rural farmers with a range of options, knowledge, skills, and inputs to increase their yields today – and tomorrow.

Click here for the full story

BLEANSA: The making of an EverGreen Agriculture info hub for Southern Africa

By in Blog on

Bleansa--1024x678

Isaac Nyoka, Coordinator of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) Southern Africa Node, discussed BLEANSA (Building a Large Evergreen Agriculture Network for Southern Africa) at the Beating Famine Conference in Malawi. BLEANSA is a network of organizations and innovation platforms aimed at spreading EverGreen Agriculture across the region.

“The network reviews experiences gained from past research, refines and optimizes EverGreen Agriculture, and distils the experiences into policy recommendations. These recommendations are then shared widely,” said Nyoka.

The network is working to sensitize policy makers to develop policies which facilitate the wide-scale promotion and adoption of EverGreen Agriculture and mobilizing extension staff, farmers and other land users and scale-up this type of climate smart farming in Southern Africa.

It is also investigating and piloting alternative farm income streams from trees to optimize the economic, environmental and social outcomes of EverGreen Agriculture application.

Click here for the full story

Trees and food security in Africa; what’s the link?

By in Blog on

Ag

The right trees, coupled with the right varieties of crops, rural advisory services, and a supportive policy environment can have a huge impact on crop yields, nutrition and income in Africa. And because smallholder farmers feed and nourish most of Africa’s 1 billion population, this is where we must start.

Agroforestry systems in Africa range from open parkland assemblages, home gardens, mixtures of trees with one or several crops, and trees planted in hedges and boundaries of fields and farms. Thanks to a rich body of science-based knowledge that brings the best in ‘agro’ and ‘forest’ together, farmers can select the right tree and crop associations for the right place. Well designed agroforestry systems provide benefits that cannot be attained from monocrops.

African farmers have the most agroforestry species to choose from out of all developing countries; according to the Agroforestree Database at least 1,141 species are known to provide functions of importance to smallholders for promoting food and nutritional security. Among these are fertilizer trees, fruit and nut trees, as well as nutritious fodder trees and shrubs, which lead to higher yields for dairy farmers.

Agroforestry using fertilizer trees has been proven to raise and stabilize maize yields. between 2007 and 2011 ICRAF and partners implemented the Malawi Agroforestry Food Security Programme funded by Irish Aid, reaching about 180,000 farmers. The programme involved introducing fertilizer, fruit, and fodder trees and shrubs into smallholder farms. By the end of the intervention maize yields, food-secure months per year, and fruit availability had changed for the better in a vast majority of households practicing agroforestry. And across hundreds of thousands of hectares of the Sahelian region of Africa, yields of grains, ground nut and cotton have improved when grown under or near the fertilizer tree Faidherbia.

Click here for the full story

Scaling up farmer managed natural regeneration and other regreening practices – six steps to success

By in Blog on

FMNR2

During a high level meeting of African Ministers of Environment convened last month in Cairo to discuss Africa’s climate change challenge, the Ministers recognized the connections between climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and increasing the productivity of land and other natural resources. This month, the release of new data on forests revealed that tree cover loss around the world now amounts to 18 million hectares, an increase of 5 percent over the average rate of loss from 2000-2012. Clearly, we need to do more to address the loss of tree cover and associated land degradation, and find more effective ways to boost land productivity, particularly across agricultural landscapes, if we are to achieve success in improving food security and reducing poverty.

We know that the right trees integrated into appropriate cropping systems, when accompanied by supporting policies, can make a big contribution to raising crop yields.  And agroforestry systems help to boost soil fertility and crop yields, while simultaneously contributing to increased supplies of firewood, fodder for livestock, higher incomes and improved nutrition for rural households. Increasing the density of trees on farms is potentially an important part of a needed “paradigm shift” towards more sustainable, “climate smart” food production systems.

The multiple benefits, especially for women, of a number of agroforestry and climate smart agricultural practices such as farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR), conservation farming, and rainwater harvesting have been documented.  A key question is what can be done to ensure that tens of millions of farmers are motivated and enabled to adopt these practices?

Click here for the full story

TAGS
COUNTRIES