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How agroforestry schemes can improve food security in developing countries
Agroforestry – the integration of trees and shrubs with crops and livestock systems – has strong potential in addressing problems of food insecurity in developing countries. Done well, it allows producers to make the best use of their land, can boost field crop yields, diversify income, and increase resilience to climate change.Click here to read more. Continue Reading
Agroforestry: A unique pathway to securing a more sustainable future
The term 'agroforestry' is one of the newest buzzwords circulating in the organic sector at the moment. It is an integrated land use system that combines elements of agriculture and forestry in a sustainable production system. It could be said that Irish farms already incorporate a certain amount of agroforestry, with plenty of hedgerows that have a practical function as field and farm boundaries. Continue Reading
Sahel Region Learning to Reap the Benefits of Shade
In Africa’s Sahel region, agroforestry techniques using traditional plantings known as “fertiliser trees” to increase soil fertility, as well as harvesting and grazing regulations, are offering new solutions to both food and human security.Such approaches were nearly lost in recent decades following devastating droughts in the Sahel. Now they are making a belated but welcome comeback. According to a 2012 U.S. Geological Survey, “regeneration agroforestry” in the Sahel stands at over 5 million hectares of agricultural fields newly covered by trees – and growing. Continue Reading
Evergreen Agriculture and Re-greening of Africa with ACIAR’s Tony Bartlett
Can the practice known as evergreen agriculture deliver both increased food and nutritional security to millions across Africa, and also have the potential to re-green the continent? Tony Barlett, the Forestry Research Program Manager with the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, thinks so.Click here to read more. Continue Reading
Tree intercropping ‘could save Africa’s soils’
Scientists have reported in Nature that the agroforestry approach of planting nutrient-fixing trees with food crops could help replenish Africa's poor quality soils, tackling one of the biggest threats to food security on the continent. Planting certain perennial trees together with food crops can more than double yields for maize and millet, which are among Sub-Saharan Africa's staple foods, scientists say. Continue Reading
Sustainable intensification explained: How Rhoda Mang’Anya made it work in Malawi
The story of Rhoda Mang’Anya, a farmer in Malawi, is one of the best examples of possible pathways to sustainable intensification. Although it is not a story from Africa RISING, it illustrates very well the kind of pathways that Africa RISING would like to enable.Rhoad Mang’Anya acquired her half-hectare plot in the early 1990′s. The plot was divided between a ‘winter season’ plot and a garden, where she had planted maize. Continue Reading