Sustainable Land Management
News & Blogs
Why are Vietnamese farmers not planting trees amid annual crops?
In Ho Ho sub-watershed in north-central Viet Nam, farmers do not deploy systems that mix trees and annual crops, except in their home gardens. In the eyes of the farmers, it is not possible to cultivate different plants together outside of a home garden. Certainly, they say, trees cannot be planted between annual crops. These […] Continue Reading
The global forestry challenge
‘Around 20–25% of global land is degraded, affecting 1.5 billion people’, said Ermias Betemariam, land-health scientist with the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), speaking at a session on land restoration at ICRAF’s annual Science Week in Bogor, Indonesia, on 14 September 2015. ‘The world has been set many challenges to try and turn this around and […] Continue Reading
ICRAF at GLF: Boosting landscape restoration with agroforestry
Land restoration is a key theme at the 2015 Global Landscapes Forum (GLF), the biggest side-event of the climate change negotiations in Paris in December. The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) is hosting a discussion on the role agroforestry can play in restoring landscapes. The following is an interview with session organizer Henry Neufeldt, Head of […] Continue Reading
Native shrubs: a simple fix for drought-stricken crops in Sub-Saharan Africa
Variability is the only guarantee when it comes to the rainfall of the Sahel, the transitional zone between the parched Sahara Desert and the wetter savanna in the south. The rains often arrive late, and sometimes they barely come at all. This can lead to devastating crop failures and famine in a region that relies […] Continue Reading
‘Permaculture the African Way’ in Cameroon’s Only Eco-Village
“the eco-village organically fertilises soil through the planting and pruning of nitrogen-fixing trees planted on farms where mixed cropping is practised. When the trees mature, the middles are cut out and the leaves used as compost. The trees are then left to regenerate and the same procedure is repeated the following season.” Mbom Sixtus describes here how […] Continue Reading
Rethinking trees in Kansas agriculture
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 […] Continue Reading