Many smallholder farms face problems with soil degradation and insufficient nutrients. Across much of Malawi continuous production of maize with few or no amendments has led to marginal soils that have been severely depleted of soil organic matter, and are nutrient deficit. Options to biologically enhance soil health include notably the diversification of crops grown with legumes. Over the last decade we have explored co-learning about agroecology principles and practices through participatory action research (PAR). Researchers, extension and community members have joined together in a process of collaborative inquiry at six sites in North, Central and Southern Malawi. We engage at multiple scales, including engaging with households through thirty on-farm research trials where we are co-testing crop diversity and organic+inorganic nutrient management options, in a mother and baby trial design that includes promoting systematically linked farmer experimentation on about 600 farms. At a community scale, we are annually monitoring over 1000 fields and interviewing farmers to better understand preferences and practices. Regional scale includes remote sensing of productivity, land cover and environmental context of the PAR sites.
Results/Conclusions
At our PAR sites in Malawi we aim to address real-world issues and devise practical options that ameliorate soils. To do this, we support a learning cycle of joint planning, acting, reflecting and synthesis to co-generate knowledge and fine tune practices for local conditions, through iterative cycles; and finally, to synthesize refined principles of agro-ecology situated in a specific context. The project focus initially included diversification, observing slow processes in soils and farmer engagement to understand local priorities and preferences. We have refined these principles to support food and environmental security on Malawi smallholder farms, as follows: 1) Multifunction agricultural diversification that includes functional trait complementarity and redundancy; 2) Goldilocks crop options for multiple services that address food and income priorities, such as long-lived pulses that fit the gap between short lived pulses and agroforestry trees; 3) Recoupling of carbon and nutrient cycling through compost, residue and soil management to enhance soil carbon active pools and tighten nitrogen cycling. We assess agricultural system performance, based on agronomic, economic, social and environmental indicators, and we visualize tradeoffs and synergies. It has proved challenging to detect environmental performance, including biodiversity, soil organic carbon status and nitrogen cycling response to alternative systems and multifunctional crops. At the same time, we have been successful at identifying farmer approved options, and assessing agronomic and economic performance.