Integrated Crop Management Vol.7-2010 - Enhancing Crop-Livestock Systems in Conservation Agriculture for Sustainable Production Intensification
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This is a story about how FAO assisted groups of farmers in five farming communities in the moist savanna zone of South Western Burkina Faso to enhance their crop-livestock systems through Conservation Agriculture (CA) practices, including crop diversification, using an innovative farmer discovery process, to bring about agricultural intensification and improvement in livelihoods. FAO’s assistance was delivered largely by working with national institutions, adding value to ongoing stakeholder resources and activities. It is a story of positive intensification outcomes brought about by adapting ‘proven principles and practices’ of CA and crop diversification into existing crop-livestock systems. FAO worked with a range of stakeholders including the farmers and their communities, and the research and extension stakeholders, to create convergence and enable a farmer-based discovery process to experiment with a set of fundamentally new principles and elements in their farming practices for integrated crop-livestock production intensification. The positive outcomes offer a real promise and an opportunity for bringing about a large scale impact on agricultural productivity and livelihoods in the moist savanna zone of West Africa, often referred to as the potential ‘bread basket’ because of the zone’s high productivity potential for integrated crop-livestock production. The conceptual elements draw substantially from new innovations in sus tainable intensification in similar agroecologies in the savannas of Brazil. This publication describes the multi-stakeholder process which led the successful outcomes, and the opportunity for a greater change that now exists and should be harnessed for sustainable agricultural development, nationally and regionally.