Farmer-Focused Tools to Improve Soil Health Monitoring on Smallholder Farms in the Morogoro Region of Tanzania

Abstract

A participatory approach was used to improve smallholder tomato farmers’ understanding of and access to soil health monitoring in the Morogoro Region of Tanzania. Baseline soil characteristics were gathered from 50 tomato fields in the region, local soil knowledge was elicited from farmers and used to develop a soil health card to qualitatively assess soil health, and farmers (n = 32) were trained on the use of a low-cost soil test kit to quantitatively assess soil health. Farmers most often described local indicators of soil health in terms of soil texture and tilth, soil color, soil water relations, and soil fertility. Following use of the soil test kit, farmers indicated increased awareness of soil testing services (Wilcoxon signed rank Z = –3.0, P = 0.001), more agreed they had access to soil testing services (Z = –2.7, P = 0.004), and more agreed that soil management recommendations were easy to understand (Z = –3.4, P < 0.0001) compared with pre-exposure results. Farmers continued to use the soil health test kit and soil health card based on a follow-up survey administered 1 year after project completion. Participatory soil health monitoring projects can improve farmers’ ability to monitor and manage soil health, potentially impacting sustained soil and plant health.

Fruit and vegetables

“…For many small-scale farmers in low-income countries soil analysis services are not always available or are prohibitively costly. However, new technologies, such as test strips for assessing key nutrients in soil and water and electronic scanners, can be used by small-scale farmers (Testen et al, 2018;Agriterra, 2018).…”

Fruits et légumes

“…Dans les pays à faible revenu, les services d'analyse de sol ne sont pas toujours accessibles ou sont d'un coût prohibitif pour de nombreux petits producteurs. Ceux-ci peuvent toutefois utiliser de nouvelles techniques, telles que les bandes d'analyse qui permettent d'évaluer les principaux éléments nutritifs présents dans le sol et dans l'eau, ou bien des scanneurs électroniques (Testen et al, 2018 ;Agriterra, 2018). Les parcelles peuvent être fertilisées avec des amendements organiques, par exemple du compost, des effluents d'élevage ou des résidus végétaux, qui contribuent à entretenir ou à améliorer la biodiversité, la structure et la teneur en matières organiques du sol.…”

Integrated Use of Local and Technical Soil Quality Indicators and Participatory Techniques to Select Them. A Review of Bibliography and Analysis of Research Strategies and Outcomes

“…The only group featuring an engineer was composed of agricultural and biological sciences experts and published on a multidisciplinary journal [13]. Only 9 papers were written in collaboration with social sciences experts [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], who worked in multidisciplinary teams (6), or only with agricultural and biological sciences experts (3) and published in all types of journals.…”

“…Investigation-18 papers had various objectives, concerning the investigation of different issues, such as agriculture [17,22,27,30,32,34,35,39,62], management techniques' effects [13,37,48], environmental ones [63], social ones [20,47].…”