The increased threat of food insecurity and climate change requires more sustainable ways of agriculture intensification in African smallholder farming systems. Ample evidence confirms that maize-based conservation agriculture (CA) systems lead to increased soil health and yield enhancement yet their overall uptake remains low in Africa. An array of studies on challenges and solutions to CA systems conducted in southern Africa principally focussed on the views of scientists, often neglecting the views of CA farmers. Therefore, this study assessed farmer decision making, innovation and contexts during implementation of maize-based CA systems in communities of central Malawi. A survey involving interviews with 226 CA farmers was deployed, triangulated with key informants comprising extension workers and policy makers. The study showed that about 58% of smallholder farmers did not adapt CA practices to their circumstances because they were strictly following change agents‟ recommendations.
The major challenge noted was competition for crop residues due to mice hunters and grazing livestock. Local by-laws initiated by the communities have started to privatise the crop residues and its grazing. However, other innovations were often not documented by extension workers, consequently neglecting more than half of the potential solutions provided by farmers. This study concludes that the majority of farmers still consider CA as a rigid approach with clear instructions that cannot be modified to suit their circumstances. Nevertheless, farmers who modified CA practices perceived benefits namely increased yields and soil health enhancement necessitating a need to encourage farmers to contextualise the CA practices. The study further delineated a wide range of challenges that farmers are facing with CA, the predominant ones being the free access and utilisation of crop residues at community level, and the mixed crop-livestock systems at farm level. Despite reporting a wide range of challenges, farmers have developed a number of solutions such as the traditional institution of by-laws that privatise the crop residues, which have not been adequately documented by extension workers for sharing with stakeholders. Extension workers should be encouraged to document such solutions for dissemination beyond local communities and encouraging further research by scientists.
On the other hand, most of the current forums being used to disseminate the CA innovations are often linear, top-down and incompatible with modern ideas of participatory interactions and innovations in AISs. Therefore, contemporary interactive innovation platforms such as learning centres should be encouraged. The establishments of a National Conservation Agriculture Task Force and CA guidelines are positive developments for coordination of stakeholders and harmonisation of CA messages in Malawi. However, for greater adoption, non-linear interaction and learning must be encouraged in practice by fully embracing innovative farmers and the voices of the pool of stakeholders with varying experiences.
Article by Limson Kaluzi1, Christian Thierfelder2 & David W. Hopkins abstracted from
Sustainable Agriculture Research; Vol. 6, No. 3; 2017. ISSN 1927-050X E-ISSN 1927-0518
Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education