Can smallholder farmers buffer rainfall variability through conservation agriculture? On-farm practices and maize yields in Kenya and Malawi

Abstract

Reduced tillage, permanent ground cover and crop diversification are the three core pillars of Conservation Agriculture (CA). We assess and compare on-farm effects of different practices related to the three pillars of CA on maize yields under ENSO-driven rainfall variability in Kenya and Malawi. Reduced tillage practices increased yields per hectare by 250 kg on average in Malawi under belowaverage rainfall conditions and by 700 kg in Kenya under above-average rainfall, but did not have any significant effect on yields under below-average rainfall conditions in Kenya. Ground cover had a positive impact on yields in Malawi (dry conditions) but not in Kenya (both dry and wet conditions), where mixed crop and livestock systems limited this practice. Crop diversification had positive impacts in Kenya (both dry and wet conditions), where maize-legume crop rotation is practiced, but not in Malawi where landholdings are too small to allow rotation. Our findings suggest that isolated CA techniques can have positive effects on yields even after only a few years of practice under variable rainfall conditions. This strengthens empirical evidence supporting the value of CA in resilience building of agricultural systems, and suggests that both full and partial adoption of CA practices should be supported in areas where climate change is leading to more variable rainfall conditions.

Buffer-Capacity-Based Livelihood Resilience to Stressors—An Early Warning Tool and Its Application in Makueni County, Kenya

“…We then examined the relationship between BC and three variables: yields, food insecurity and incidence of pests and diseases using Spearmen's rho and Pearson's Correlation analysis. The average yield of maize harvested in the 2014/2015 and 2015/2016 seasons was used as a proxy for yield, since maize is the most important staple crop, being cultivated by 78% of households (Boillat et al, 2019). For food security, respondents reported the number of months in which their households ran out of produced and/or purchased food in the 12 months preceding the survey.…”

“…In sub-Saharan Africa, smallholder farmers are increasingly exposed to global shocks such as climate change, economic crises, pandemics, and international political instability (Leichenko and O'Brien, 2002;Boillat et al, 2019). Understanding their capacity to cope with these shocks is crucial for any efforts to mitigate them and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).…”

Farmer Preparedness for Building Resilient Agri-Food Systems: Lessons From the 2015/2016 El Niño Drought in Malawi

“…Furthermore, there is no deliberate effort at EPA level to analyse the forecast so that local farmers can understand the implications and then take decisions to create resilient food systems. This is evident in the lack of a significant difference in yields between farmers who were aware of the erratic weather and those who were not (Table 3), whereas there were significant differences between the hybrid maize yields of CA farmers and non-CA farmers (Boillat et al, 2019; Table 5 and Supplementary Table 1, for more details see Jew et al, 2020). As illustrated in Table 5, farmers perceived a significant decrease in yields from what they would have expected across all crops.…”

“…A lack of evidence of increased yields is thought to be a reason for disadoption of CA (Chinseu et al, 2019), and this illustrates the importance of not "overselling" the benefits of CA to potential adopters, particularly as shown here, CA cultivation of hybrid maize does outperform non-CA cultivation during erratic rainfall conditions. The influence of the different components of CA cultivation on maize performance on this dataset is examined in detail in Boillat et al (2019).…”

“…It is generally conceptualized to be an agriculture system encompassing several technologies. CA has been shown to increase resilience to dry spells and heat stress (e.g., Ngwira et al, 2012;Steward et al, 2018Steward et al, , 2019Boillat et al, 2019) but has limited uptake among farmers, and increasing evidence of disadoption, where farmers return to their previous practices once the intervention in place to promote CA ceases (Pedzisa et al, 2015;Ward et al, 2016;Chinseu et al, 2019;Bouwman et al, 2021). Reasons for this have been discussed widely (see Hermans et al, 2020), with possible reasons varying from constraints at household level such as poor health, labor and capital availability (Jew et al, 2020), a lack of technical support (Chinseu et al, 2019) and practical limitations, such as a lack of equipment (Habanyati et al, 2018) or land (Bouwman et al, 2021).…”