Context: Adaptation to climate stress is an unprecedented challenge facing cropping systems. Most adaptation assessments focus on how adaptation options affect yields of a single crop under different weather or climate conditions. Yet, cropping systems often comprise more than one crop, and holistic assessments should consider all crops grown in a cropping system. One adaptation option is Conservation Agriculture that is commonly defined around a set of three principles: minimum mechanical soil disturbance, permanent soil organic cover, and crop species diversification. Objective: Here we estimated the statistical effect of Conservation Agriculture on cropping-system yields under historical climate conditions. Methods: The cropping-system yields considered all crops grown including maize (Zea mays L.) and legumes in intercropping or rotation, or both. The climate conditions included conditions of heat stress for maize and precipitation balances during the maize growing season. Heat stress for maize was studied using growing degree days over 30 °C. Precipitation balance was the difference between precipitation and reference evapotranspiration. Data included 6296 yield observations from on-farm trials in farmer plots conducted over 14 seasons (2005–2006 to 2018–2019) in ten communities in Malawi. These yield data were coupled with daily weather data. We studied three treatments: (1) a Control Practice treatment where the soil was tilled, crop residues were removed, and there was no crop species diversification, (2) a No-Tillage treatment where the soil was not tilled, crop residues were retained, and there was no crop species diversification, and (3) a Conservation Agriculture treatment where the soil was not tilled, crop residues were retained, and there was crop species diversification through legume intercropping. The use of maize varieties and legume rotation changed over time; however, the treatments studied remained the same over the entire length of the on-farm trials period in all individual communities. Results and conclusions: Results of our study showed that heat stress for maize had a negative effect on cropping-system yields for non-stress-tolerant maize varieties and no legume rotation, although the Conservation Agriculture treatment reduced this negative effect compared with the Control Practice treatment. With the use of stress-tolerant maize varieties and legume rotation and Conservation Agriculture, our results suggest that heat stress for maize did not have a negative effect on cropping-system yields. Significance: Our results demonstrate how Conservation Agriculture can improve the adaptive capacity of cropping systems and this provides urgently needed evidence on how farmers can adapt to climate stress.
Tag: farmers attitude
Transforming climate science into usable services: The effectiveness of co-production in promoting uptake of climate information by smallholder farmers in Senegal
Does the provision of weather and climate information services (WCIS) enhance farmer’s use of forecasts in informing farm decisions? This paper assesses the effectiveness of the Multi-disciplinary Working Group (MWG) – a WCIS co-production initiative in Senegal in influencing farmers uptake of weather and climate information (WCI). WCIS are increasingly gaining importance and widely touted as critical in helping farmers adapt to climate variability. While there have been various WCIS initiatives producing and translating climate data into tailored information and knowledge in different parts of the world, there is hardly any rigorous evidence assessing their effectiveness in improving uptake. In this assessment, we use innovative survey methods and apply rigorous analytical approaches that control for self-selection bias to establish causal linkages between the MWG and use of WCIS. Our findings indicate that MWGs are positively associated with farmers’ awareness, access and uptake of WCI resulting in farm management responses depending on the type of information used. The presence of MWGs generally increases farmer’s awareness of WCI by 18%, access by 12% and uptake by 10%. Furthermore, use of seasonal forecasts is generally associated with a higher proportion of farmers using improved seed, fertilizers and manure, but negatively with crop diversification within MWG locations. This suggests that participatory approaches in the provision of tailored climate information and advisory services can lead to higher uptake and use among farmers in informing farm management responses for better adaptation to climate change. We highlight lessons for improved evaluations of WCIS in future.