CA in the study area

The promotion of CA among smallholder farmers in Laikipia County has mainly taken place through several large projects, amidst many other projects that promoted sustainable development in the area. Starting in 1997, Kenya Network for Draught Animal Technology (KENDAT) started to promote draught-animal technology to support conservation tillage. Since 2000, the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) has been testing the suitability of legume cover crops in the Legume Research Network Project (LRNP) (Kaumbutho and Kienzle, 2007).

In 2004 the project ‘Conservation Agriculture Project- Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development’ (CA-SARD) was implemented by the African Conservation Tillage Network (ACT-Network) and KARI, in partnership with and funded by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). It was implemented in two phases, CA-SARD I lasting until 2006 and CA-SARD II lasting from 2007-2010. The project was active in Siaya, Bungoma, Nakuru, Mbeere and Laikipia counties in Kenya. The objective of the project was to contribute to growth and

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improved food security in Kenya by scaling up CA as a sustainable land management tool. The project approach articulated cross-cutting issues that facilitate adoption of CA technology by smallholder farmers, which included involvement of the input supply chain, the CA implement supply chain, agro-processing and market access (Mulinge, 2010).

The CA-SARD project was executed through the Farmer Field School (FFS) approach, with 10 FFSs in Laikipia comprising of 25-30 farmers each, numbers that quickly reduced to about 10-15 farmers each. The extension department of the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) implemented the project in collaboration with local partners. One of the outcomes was that 1,482 farmers were reached by a trained facilitator who also distributed a reference manual developed by ACT-Network. The evaluation report showed that one of the major difficulties for CA farmers include the high initial cost of starting CA, especially the cost of herbicides, and the lag between the initial point in starting CA and achieving full potential benefits of CA. Also, access to CA equipment was a big problem. Benefits were an increased harvest, and reduced labour for women and children. For children it gave them more time to study and play, while women had enough time to engage in other small business, value adding and marketing of their produce. The evaluation report importantly concluded that increased knowledge of CA is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for farmers to adopt the technology, it needs to be supported with improved institutions (Mulinge, 2010).

The ABACO project followed up on CA-SARD and started its activities in Laikipia in 2011. In the following period, eleven groups were selected to start FFSs and to establish demo plots. The total membership was 270 farmers of which 175 were women (65%). By the end of 2012 two groups fell out and currently there are nine groups with an active membership of 134 farmers of which 82 are women (61%). The FFSs are provided with inputs and equipment by the ABACO project and training by the MoA facilitators. Moreover, two soil moisture CA trial sites were established in early 2011. The main trial crop was maize with soil cover provided by dry mulch, black beans, butter beans and pigeon peas (Min. of Agr., 2013).

Other stakeholders also became involved in the promotion of CA (see section 5.2.1 for a full discussion of the main CA stakeholders), including Syngentha foundation, CETRAD, Lengetia farm and the Olpejeta wildlife conservancy. The latter two employ extension officers as part of their community development programmes in the area around their farm/conservancy. CETRAD covers parts of Daiga and Laikipia Central sub-county, mainly with research projects that try to facilitate CA adoption through farmer resource centres (Min. of Agr., 2013).

78 4.5 Study area Madagascar: Lake Alaotra 4.5.1 Description of the area

The study area in Madagascar, which I refer to as the Lake Alaotra region, was located in the district of Ambatondrazaka, one of the five districts in the Alaotra-Mangoro region, which is one of the three regions of the Toamasina province (also called Tamatave province), about 175 km North-East of the capital Antananarivo (see Figure 4-2). The town of Ambatondrazaka is the main urban centre in the district, and is home to approximately 70,000 people. Although this is not a high population, it has doubled every 18 years since the 1960s and the area is therefore characterized by rapid population growth. The total population in the Lake Alaotra area is estimated at 670,000 people, of which 540,000 people are depending on agriculture for their livelihoods. The most important crop for most smallholders farmers in the Lake Alaotra region is rice, which they grow in the paddies for subsistence but also to generate income. Self-sufficiency in rice has been frequently used by researchers to draw up farm typologies, and the farmers who are not self-sufficient in rice belong to the poorest households.

Figure 4-2 Location of the two study sites ‘The North’ and ‘The South’ in the Lake Alaotra region in Madagascar

Lake Alaotra is the biggest lake of the country with a length of over 35 km. It is one of the major rice-growing areas of Madagascar with more than 100,000 ha of rice fields with an estimated production of 200,000 ton/year, of which about a third is exported to the urban centres of Antananarivo and Toamasina. The average yields range from 1 t/ha for upland rice to 2.5 t/ha for paddy fields with limited water control (Penot 2010). Exact data of rice production and productivity is not available.

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The climatic factor that limits the productivity in the Lake Alaotra region is the long dry season that lasts more than six months. The rain season starts usually in November, and continues to the end of March. During the end of the rain season, cyclones may occur, leading to heavy rainfall.

Mean annual rainfall between 1942 and 1988 was 1051 mm near Ambatondrazaka (see Table 4-1).

The average annual temperature is 22ºC.

Table 4-1 Average rainfall per month in the Lake Alaotra region in Madagascar (Source: CALA measurements from 1942-1988)

Month Rainfall (mm) Percentage (%)

January 244 23

February 201 19

March 190 18

April 44 4

May 10 1

June 7 1

July 6 1

August 7 1

September 3 0

October 26 2

November 109 10

December 203 19

Total 1051 100

Farmers usually have several fields with very different production systems that vary according to the topography, ranging mostly from 750 to 950 meters above sea-level. The general distinction is made between fields on the tanety (hillside), baiboho (fertile colluvial depositions), and tanimbary (semi-irrigated rice paddies). The tanety are Ferralsols (texture 39% clay, 29% silt and 32% sand) (Razafimbelo et al., 2010) and are sometimes further classified according to their level of compaction, fertility or degradation status. The higher tanety are characterised by the growth of grasses, called bozaka, and very large erosion gullies, known as lavakas. Some of the lower tanety are relatively fertile although still strictly rain-fed, with soils that tend to be chemically poor and relatively acid (PH around 5) due to the granite and migmatite mother material (Husson et al., 2012). The higher tanety are used for cattle grazing, and where lower tanety are used for agriculture it is for crops like maize, cassava, beans and groundnuts. Soil erosion is a big challenge on the tanety, and the lavakas are a prominent feature in the landscape.

The baiboho fields are Cambisols (texture 20% clay, 38% silt and 42% sand) and relatively fertile and flat. They stand out from the plains around the lake and as such are generally not inundated in the rain season (Razafimbelo et al., 2010). Because of capillary rise from the high water table, the baiboho offer the possibility of growing an off-season crop. These fields are suitable for most crops, including vegetables. The tanimbary, or rice paddies are distinguished according to the

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possibility to control the water level. The tanimbary are the rice paddies with good water control (French: rizières irriguées, or RI), while the term saro-drano indicates rice fields with low water control (French: rizières à mauvaise maîtrise de l’eau, or simply RMME). The latter are sometimes entirely covered with water when high water levels in the lake make drainage impossible, or fall dry during droughts. Some rice paddies offer the possibility of growing a crop in the counter-season, while others do not. In practice, the topo-sequence offers gradual shifts and the distinction between e.g. the saro-drano and baiboho is sometimes difficult to make.