Conservation agriculture innovation platform

Conservation agriculture has three principles:

• not ploughing
• permanent soil cover
• crop rotation

RIU Zambia is supporting conservation agriculture scale up in Monze and Chipata where stakeholders are using the learning from this intervention to improve farmers' practice. The work includes supporting a number of joint demonstration, sharing experiences/ knowledge, coordinating and harmonizing of activities and building capacity for member organizations. The conservation agriculture project is organised around an innovation platform - working with at least 15 stakeholder organisations in each district. There is also support to a voucher system that encourages private sector involvement in scaling-up the use of conservation agriculture research outputs.

The Draft Animal Power voucher system kicked off with support given to Chipata district based entrepreneur trading as Kumawa Agri-services Ltd. Kumawa Agri-services Ltd has been distributing agro inputs to small scale farmers in the entire Eastern Province of Zambia. But the farmers could not significantly scale up production due to inadequate land preparation implements for conservation agriculture farming. RIU support is towards developing local entrepreneurs with capacity to give conservation agriculture tillage services to local farmers at a fee. The programme aims at supporting over 75 households per learning site. Together with similar support in Monze district, the Draft Animal Power voucher system which is being implemented by Matantala rural integrated development enterprise is estimated to benefit at least 2250 households (13,500 people).

RIU Zambia supported joint field days in Chipata and Monze in 2009/2010 agricultural season, to increase exposure of farmers to conservation agriculture practices and increase interaction among stakeholders/promoters. The field days were done in conjunction with private sector actors, particularly seed companies. Generally, there is increasing realization among stakeholders of the need to collaborate in order to scale-up use of conservation agriculture technologies and practices among small-scale farmers. However, the question of attribution of impact among some key actors, appears to discourage them from collaborating with others, especially in places that have got a number of actors involved in rendering similar support to small-scale farmers.