Sustainable agricultural intensification : a handbook for practitioners in East and Southern Africa

This book provides an insight into the background, lessons learned, and the methodology of facilitating the application of best-bet/best-fit agricultural technologies to smallholder farms in East and Southern Africa (ESA). All technologies highlighted within this book, except those on livestock feeding, were trialed and demonstrated in farmers' fields over an eight-year period [2012 - 2020] as part of the Feed the Future/USAID funded research-for-development Africa RISING ESA Project and supported by the CGIAR. The livestock feed technologies were compiled from Eastern Africa literature and included to offer a full set of technologies relevant for farmers in mixed farming systems.Topics covered include the introduction of resilient and nutrient-dense crops, better arrangement of crops in the field to amplify intercrop benefits, and the management of soils to improve soil fertility and minimize physical soil and nutrient loss. The publication also features technologies for postharvest loss reduction, livestock feeding, food processing, and in the later chapters, important expositions on how multiple technologies can be creatively integrated in a farming system and how key products of research can be taken to scale. In the first chapter and throughout the handbook, the importance of taking gender dynamics into account to ensure technologies produce equitable outcomes is emphasized. This book: provides evidence-based descriptions of sustainable agricultural intensification technologies that have been validated iteratively with smallholder farmers.a convenient, easy-to-read, and science-based 'how-to' guide for successful deployment of improved agricultural technologies that will ensure readers from development/scaling agencies save time and resources for research trials and instead focus on technology deployment.gives evidence of how building research and development partnerships can be a critical element for successful delivery and scaling up of agricultural technologies.The book is aimed primarily at development practitioners who seek new competences in taking new technologies to scale. However, the breadth of topics covered makes this book an essential resource for agricultural scientists as well as university and college students aspiring to apply systems thinking in future agricultural research and development work. This book presents some of the improved agricultural technologies that were validated by the Africa RISING Project in East and Southern Africa (ESA), focusing on smallholder farmers in Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia, and working in partnership with development (scaling) institutions. It consists of 11 chapters. Chapter 1 shows how gender concerns must be woven into all sustainable intensification (SI) interventions to produce equitable outcomes. It describes activities to enhance women's participation, measure the benefits, and transform gender relations. Chapter 2 describes the performance of new cereal and legume crop varieties introduced by Africa RISING into agroecosystems in which they had not been tested before. Chapter 3 presents technologies to diversify the common maize-dominated cropping systems and address human nutrition, improve soil organic matter, and maximize the benefits of applying fertilizer. Chapter 4 presents technologies for replacing the nutrients lost from cropped fields with external fertilizer sources in a manner that minimizes the consequences of too little or too much application. Chapter 5 is about soil conservation. Chapter 6 presents conservation agriculture, which can help smallholder farmers build better resilience to the consequences of climate change and variable weather. Improved technologies for drying, shelling, and hermetic storage of grain are presented in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 provides information to help farmers use outputs from crop production systems to formulate supplementary feed. Chapter 9 follows with technologies that allow well-planned nutrition-specific interventions (recipes) to utilize various livestock and crop products to enhance family nutrition, with specific attention paid to diets for children. Chapter 10 presents examples from the preceding chapters to illustrate the potential impacts of interconnected technologies. Lastly, Chapter 11 presents experiences and lessons learned from using these approaches to transfer and scale the technologies This book aims to demonstrate how sustainable intensification (SI) of smallholder livelihood farming systems can be achieved through the delivery, application, and adoption of evidence-based recommended technologies and knowledge