Tag Archive for: Soil Health

Protecting and Developing African Agriculture in the Face of Climate Change

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Author: Patrick Dupoux and Younes Zrikem | Published: November 18, 2016

The United Nations 2016 climate change conference (COP 22), meeting this week—through Nov. 18—in Marrakech, Morocco, presents an historic opportunity to refocus the global community’s attention on the need to help developing nations adapt to climate change. In no area could this be more pressing than Africa, where protecting food security and ending hunger is an urgent necessity.

During the COP21 last year in Paris, the world’s developed nations reaffirmed their commitment to provide at least $100 billion per year, beginning in 2020, to help developing nations combat climate change.

In the past, most funds have been used on mitigation projects—those intended to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. But there is a growing consensus that work focused on adapting to climate change is of equal importance and more funding needs to be devoted to it.

This is a step in the right direction. With 28 African countries expected to more than double in population by 2050, and 10 African countries—Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia—expected to grow “by at least a factor of five” by 2100, according to the U. N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Africa will be hard pressed to feed itself as temperature increases drive farm production down.

While increases in temperature and carbon dioxide “can increase some crop yields in some places,” experts at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have noted, Africa isn’t among them.

In fact, the opposite is true: The scientific consensus is that a temperature increase of 2°Celsius would result in an average reduction of 15% to 20% in agricultural yields on the continent.

The Center for Global Development’s 2011 report, “Quantifying Vulnerability to Climate Change Implications for Adaptation Assistance,” forecasts median agricultural productivity losses due to climate change ranging from 18% in North Africa to 19.8% in Central Africa through 2050.

The weak output in Africa, reinforced by a spike in temperatures and exacerbated by extreme climate events, could create a vicious loop of food insecurity, impoverishment, mass migration and, finally, armed conflict. Climate-related migration and conflict already are a reality on the continent, and more often than not they are related to agriculture and food.

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Farming Carbon into Soils and Trees: A Climate-Smart Mid-Century Strategy for Agriculture

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Author: Marcia Delonge | Published: November 14, 2016

In 2050, the Paris Agreement will be 34 years old,  Google will be 52,  the National Park Service will be 134, the tractor will be 158, the United States will be 274, and hopefully we’ll all be celebrating being well along the way to a cooler future. While it may seem like a lot of time, there’s a lot of work ahead of us.

That’s why leaders around the world have been working in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement to develop strategies to reduce net global warming emissions to established goals by mid-century (2050). As it turns out, an important part of this work has to do with boosting food, farms, and farmers—and that’s what I’ll talk about. However, if you’d like to learn about other solutions, check out the posts by my colleagues on biofuels, forests, and the energy sector.

First, a note about the land carbon “sink”

There is growing awareness of the value of the so-called “land carbon sink”. What is this all about?  Well, plants and soils store carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere. The more carbon can be “sequestered” into leaves, roots, stems tree trunks, and soils each year, the bigger the carbon “sink” and the smaller the climate change problem. Currently, about 762 million Mt CO2e worth of carbon are stored in plants and soils in the US. This is significant—enough to offset 11% of emissions— but insufficient given the magnitude of the climate change problem. Not only that, but since storing more carbon in lands also means building and protecting healthier soils, an investment in soil health simply makes sense. Luckily, the USDA already has a plan to help farms and forests sequester or offset an extra 120 million Mt CO2e/y (by 2025). This plan is a step in the right direction, but we can do better.

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Agriculture and Food Security at Heart of Climate Change Action

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Published: November 16, 2016

The world must rapidly move to scale up actions and ambitions on climate change FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva told delegates at the United Nations Climate Change conference (COP22) in Morocco today.

Speaking at the high-level action day on agriculture and food security, Graziano da Silva noted that climate change impacts on agriculture – including crops, livestock, forestry, fisheries, land and water – are already undermining global efforts to assure food security and nutrition.

And the rural poor are the most affected.

With over 90 percent of countries referring to the important role of agriculture in their national plans to adapt to and mitigate climate change, Graziano da Silva stressed that

“it is time to invest in sustainable and climate-resilient agriculture as a fundamental part of the climate solution.”

Last year’s conference in Paris led to the world’s first legally binding global climate deal. The current summit in Marrakech, Morocco is geared to implementation of the pledges all signatory countries made. Echoing the prevalent spirit at the COP, the Paris Agreement is irreversible and inaction would be a disaster for the world.

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New View: Carbon Is Not the Enemy

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Author: Mark Fischetti | Published: November 14, 2016

Carbon dioxide is bad—it causes global warming. Carbon dioxide is political—U.S. democrats want regulations to reduce emissions into the atmosphere and republicans, led by president-elect Donald Trump, want to scrap such rules. But William McDonough says all that is wrong. “Carbon is not the enemy,” he said in a keynote speech at the recent SXSW Eco conference. The same phrase headlines his new commentary published today in Nature. “It is we who have made carbon toxic,” he writes. “In the right place, carbon is a resource and a tool.”

McDonough, founder of William McDonough + Partners, is a world-renowned architect, designer and urban planner. He has spearheaded several design movements—reflected in titles of his bestselling books such as Cradle to Cradle, and The Upcycle—as well as the idea of a circular economy. They all champion smarter ways to design products, buildings and communities to use resources more sustainably, generate less waste and create positive impacts rather than just minimize negative ones.

His latest point is that citizens and their politicians have to change the conversation about carbon. Climate change, he maintains, is a design failure, a breakdown in the natural carbon cycle caused by humans. By rethinking how we design things, especially cities, we can restore the natural carbon cycle and exploit it for human gain, creating positive environmental impacts rather than harm.

He claims that the focus of carbon regulation is also out of whack. “Striving for less pollution means we will do less bad,” he noted at SXSW Eco. “Instead we should ask, what can we do that creates more good?”

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Defining Organic; All About Animal Welfare, Regenerative Agriculture, and Rural Economics; Guest Heretic Will Harris of White Oak Pastures

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Author: Adrienne Hew

When Will Harris’s dad started using ammonium nitrate fertilizer on his farm in 1946, he had no idea he was destroying the microscopic flora and fauna on the land that are necessary for maintaining healthy top soil. So after 50 years, he moved to a farming system that is not only organic, but regenerates the soil by emulating nature’s own processes while concentrating on animal welfare and restoring rural economics.

Harris’s White Oak Pastures farm pasture raises and hand butchers 5 red meat animal species and 5 poultry species. Using techniques learned from the Savory Network, Harris uses these animals to restore balance to the soil. As a result, his farm is able to withstand drought and heavy rains equally well with no loss in crop production.

In today’s episode of the Nutrition Heretic Podcast, we learn about the inaccuracies of labels such as organic and grass-fed as well as how Harris’s smart farming methods are helping to restore his 150 year old family farm into a thriving farm for the future.

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A Call to Action to Save One of America’s Most Important Natural Resources

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Soil plays critical roles in food security, climate mitigation, ecosystem function, and buffering against extreme weather events.  Although it is essential for the stability of the planet, soil is disappearing at an alarming rate.

In the United States, estimates are that soil on cultivated cropland is eroding at an average rate of 5.2 tons per acre per year, while the average rate of soil formation falls between 0.008 and 0.51 tons per acre per year. Some parts of the Midwest are losing soil at a much faster rate, especially during extreme weather events—in some regions of the United States, erosion has been measured at over 100 tons per acre in a single storm. That means that a layer of soil that took over 350 years to form was destroyed in a single day.

Climate change is expected to increase pressure on soil as the frequency of extreme weather events increases, bringing forceful rain and flooding, which can strip away soil. Without coordinated action, the United States is on track to run out of topsoil—the medium upon which crop production depends—before the end of the 21st century.

Erosion is not the only threat to America’s soil. Many urban soils have been contaminated with lead or toxic substances, posing a threat to human health. In some cases, intensive forestry and rangeland practices have also resulted in release of substantial soil carbon into the atmosphere, slowing progress toward tackling climate change. Another threat has been the deposition of atmospheric pollutants in forests, which has leached essential nutrients from forest soils in many parts of the Nation.

In issuing a call to action for soil, OSTP seeks innovative actions from Federal agencies, academic scientists and engineers, farmers, entrepreneurs, businesses, advocates, and members of the public in a nationwide effort to impede soil loss, enhance soil genesis, and restore degraded soils.

Federal Agency Input on Soil: A New National Science and Technology Council Working Group

Under the National Science and Technology Council, OSTP has established the Soil Science Interagency Working Group (SSIWG), which will receive technical input from 15 Federal departments and agencies. This input will include identifying knowledge and technology gaps, identifying research and conservation priorities, fostering public-private collaborations, and working toward Federal actions to protect soil resources.

A National Call to Action

OSTP is issuing a nationwide call to action for farmers, scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, advocates, and the broader public to work together to develop innovative solutions to promote soil health and protect soil from degradation.  In order to meet a challenge of this scale, innovation and collaboration are needed at three key stages:

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Agriculture biologique : le meilleur plan sous les Tropiques

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[ English | Deutsch | French ]

Une étude comparative menée durant dix ans par l’Institut suisse de recherche de l’agriculture biologique (FiBL) au Kenya donne des résultats limpides : le bio produit autant que les méthodes conventionnelles, tout en offrant un meilleur revenu et une meilleure santé aux paysans.

L’étude a été menée à Thika et Chuka, au Kenya, avec des partenaires locaux depuis 2007. Elle dégonfle un mythe : l’agriculture biologique aurait besoin de plus d’espace pour obtenir des rendements comparables à ceux de l’agriculture conventionnelle. D’autre  part, le bio coûte moins cher en intrants et se vend plus cher sur les marchés. Après cinq ans de conversion, les agriculteurs/trices biologiques commencent à commencent à gagner plus : leur recette est de 53% plus élevée dès la sixième année.

Autre facteur important révélé par l’étude : l’amélioration significative de la fertilité des sols. Mieux : la non-utilisation d’intrants chimiques génère des effets bénéfiques sur l’écosystème des fermes, ainsi que sur la santé des personnes, car il n’y a pas de résidus nocifs. Des études parallèles du FiBL en Inde et en Bolivie sur le coton et le café ont montré des résultats positifs similaires pour les méthodes biologiques.

La recherche à long terme «Farming Systems Comparison in the Tropics» (SysCom) vise à fournir des preuves scientifiques sur les avantages et le potentiel des cultures biologiques par rapport aux systèmes conventionnels. L’objectif est d’encourager des politiques favorables à une utilisation durable des terres aux niveaux local, régional et international.

L’étude a été menée de façon très équitable au Kenya. Elle ne compare pas l’agriculture industrielle avec des productions très spécialisées de l’agriculture biologique. Elle observe une agriculture plutôt classique avec céréales de base (maïs), comprenant une rotation des cultures et d’autres caractéristiques durables. En conséquence, certains résultats sont très proches entre les deux systèmes. Mais dans son ensemble, l’étude montre clairement que l’approche organique est une stratégie viable dans les régions tropicales. A condition que la formation et la diffusion des connaissances en bio reçoivent une plus grande attention.

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How Animals Impact Regenerative Agriculture Efforts

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I recently visited Will Harris’ farm White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. Harris is a pioneer of grass-fed products and what he calls “a kinder, gentler agriculture.”

His farm is a great demonstration of how you can convert conventionally farmed land to a healthy, thriving farm based on regenerative methods. Conventional chemical agriculture typically involves the growing of a single crop, such as corn — a strategy that decimates the soil.

Harris recently purchased the land I visited, where he’s in the process of implementing regenerative principles to rebuild the soil and make it productive again.

These 220 acres he recently purchased for his expansion are adjacent to his old farm, which has been in his family for 150 years. He expects to be able to bring the current organic matter in the soil from its current baseline of about 0.5 percent to about 5 percent over the next two decades.

“This land has been farmed in what I call the trifecta — cotton, corn and peanuts; cotton, corn and peanuts, over and over again. All three crops are really hard on land for different reasons,” he says.

“This soil is, in my mind, completely dead. The biological life just doesn’t exist here anymore, because of intense tillage and the tremendous amount of chemical fertilizers being used on it, as well as pesticides …

What we’ve done is fenced the property. We put about 1,000 cows on the land. There’s nothing for them to eat out here [right now] so we feed them hay and haylage during the period that we’re asking them to transition this land for us. They will be out here for about a month.”

Animals Are an Important Aspect of Regenerative Agriculture

Indeed, animals are an important aspect when it comes to achieving healthy soil in which to grow crops. By urinating and defecating on the land, the animals provide important nourishment for soil microbes.

Harris also spreads perennial grass seed on the bare land, which the cows will help trod into the ground. Besides adding manure, the hoof activity helps break down the hard cap on the land.

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Chickens Can Save the Planet, too: An Interview with Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin

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If you’re familiar  with the groundbreaking book “Cows Can Save the Planet,” you understand the role cattle can play in restoring the world’s soils and reversing the impacts of climate change.

But did you know that chickens, when raised in regenerative agroforestry-based systems, are proving to be key players in the regenerative revolution, too—especially when it comes to empowering the world’s 500 million small farmers?

In order to meet the world’s growing demand for chicken and eggs, the poultry industry has mercilessly worked to cut costs and increase supply. They’ve succeeded, but only at the expense of farmers, consumers, chickens and the environment. The current factory farm model of poultry production is unstable, toxic and heavily reliant on antibiotics, feed subsidies and abusive labor practices.

Luckily one man has dedicated his life to designing an alternative to toxic factory farms that can not only exceed current and future demand for healthy and humanely produced chicken and eggs, but also empower small farmers and restore  rural communities, local ecologies and our food system.

Regeneration International recently talked chickens and regeneration with Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin who, as Chief-Strategy Officer of the Main Street Project, is developing a poultry-centered regenerative agriculture system and leads a team that is changing how small farmers are producing food around the world.

Raised in the rainforests of Guatemala during the country’s brutal 36-year civil war, Reginaldo and his family remained well fed due to his father’s deep understanding of forest food systems. Surrounded by poverty and malnutrition, Reginaldo discovered that the key to agricultural abundance and true food security is regenerative agriculture. Determined to put his understanding of regenerative agriculture to use, he went on to study at what was then the top agriculture school  in Latin America, the Central National School of Agriculture (ENCA). It was here that  he learned to apply the systems thinking that has made conventional agriculture models so widespread and replicable to the regenerative agriculture model.

Today, Reginaldo is leading the team, the strategies, and designing the processes to take the Main Street Project’s poultry-centered regenerative agriculture system to large-scale. Having spent the past seven years perfecting the system with Latino migrant farmers in Northfield Minnesota, Reginaldo and his team at the Main Street Project are in the process of adapting and expanding their model for farmers in other U.S. States, Mexico and Guatemala.

Interview with Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin

(Watch the full interview above or on RI’s Youtube Channel)

RI: How did you first got involved with regenerative agriculture?

Haslett-Marroquin: I really came into this as a kid. I grew up in the rainforest with my brothers and sisters. When we started our farming system in the rainforest we did what everybody else did—you cut down the forest, you burn it and plant corn, black beans, soy beans and squash and all that. We only did it once, that I remember, before my dad said we are not going to make it, this is going to degenerate the ability of the soil to feed us. So we created a whole new system amidst everyone doing the opposite. And that is how I as a kid I became very interested in the biodynamics of these new ways of producing food, and later on, professionally learn about how much more efficient the regenerative systems our family developed were. That’s really where my beginnings were.

The [regenerative poultry] system that I am working on came as a result of trying to adapt to the current challenges that we are facing with climate change, with poverty, especially this almost unbelievable point we have gotten to with food security, even though almost every community in the world has the capacity to be food secure. Why have we not done like what we did growing up? We were poor, yes. But we were never food insecure. And now we have these massive institutions talking about food insecurity as the purpose for being while really food insecurity has continued to increase. That’s really what got me thinking. Is there a more strategic and simple way of thinking about it? And so poultry is an entry point that deals with those things head on and allows us to do larger-scale deployment of small farming systems and do them using the principles that I learned as a kid.

RI: So why poultry, is this something that was integrated into your family’s agricultural system in Guatemala?

Haslett-Marroquin: Yes and if you look at the whole world there is hardly any place on earth or a farmer on earth that doesn’t have some sort of familiarity with some kind of bird. Whether it’s pheasants, turkey, or chickens and even pigeons in Vietnam for example. Birds are the one type of livestock that unites  us globally. So if we are going to create a global movement that actually addresses some of these fundamental issues, and we are going to do it from the standpoint of regenerative agriculture—meaning socially, economically, and ecologically regenerative, highly scientific—we have to start with one thing that is common to most of the world. And that’s what chickens do.

RI: How does this system regenerate local economies and societies? What effect does it have on the supply chain?

Haslett-Marroquin: Let’s put it this way. The purpose of this is to produce a new system from which we can reengineer the way we grow and distribute food. And the way we supply those value chains and supply chains so that we can transform the kind of food consumers can have access to and transform the way farmers interact  with each other.

Conventional systems are engineered to be extractive—extractive of the labor of people, extractive of the natural resources of the soil, extractive of fossil resources—to be able to make it, in their words, more efficient in terms of productivity.

The economic regeneration of a system depends on the ripple effect of all of the economic transactions so that extraction does not happen. Rather than extraction, there is flow and balance of resources.

Ecologically, it is actually a matter of design. If we are going to design efficient systems, we have to work with the ecology. By restoring and regenerating the ecology this is how we achieve the economic returns that we seek. By organizing the economic returns so that they flow in a balanced way, we keep them from getting extracted from the families that need them to sustain and regenerate and continue to regenerate the system over time.

As you do those two things, the economic and the ecological, and achieve high levels of energy transformation efficiency, you also create  the social interactions which allow it to regenerate the ability of people to be with each other and learn more about how to live together. That is what is degenerating, our ability to understand who we are within the larger context of the world and food.

RI: Why does the world need this model?

Haslett-Marroquin: As you think of what conventional agriculture has delivered us, we see a lot of health problems on the consumer side. As a consumer, I don’t want to continue to purchase these cheap foods that are making all of us sick. Food-related diseases are huge and there is no need for it, because we can develop a new system.

We always start with the question “what if?” In this case, what if we don’t even need cheap food? What if the idea of cheap food is so misunderstood that it is more expensive at the end of the day because of the consequences of consuming it? What if what we really need is a reconnection between the consumers and farmers so that we can reengineer how food actually happens from the farm to the table, and how that energy gets reintegrated back into the system?

Just like consumers, farmers are suffering from lack of opportunity, ownership and control, access to resources, new technologies, because all of the ownership and control of the current food system is concentrated in the hands of a few powerful multinational corporations. So consumers need these systems because we need healthy food, accessible to everyone. And farmers, small farmers especially—over 70 percent  of the food in the world is producer by small farmers with under 5 hectares of land—this allows us to bring them back into the equation at a larger scale with more power, greater ownership and control, and to connect them more directly back to consumers. We need to regenerate the social connectedness between producers and consumers so that we can rebuild that trust and confidence that was lost as we gave up the ownership and control.

RI: How does the regenerative poultry project synchronize with the intentions of the 4p1000 initiative. And what opportunities does the initiative bring for Main Street Project and more broadly in Mexico and Latin America?

Haslett-Marroquin: Here’s how we connect this opportunity. 4p1000 is an ecological imperative. The idea of bringing back 4 for every 1000 particles of CO2 from the air into permanent storage and doing that on the basis of soil restoration is critical. But really that shouldn’t be the end goal. The end goal should be beyond that. When you think of just bringing that carbon back, think about why it was out there in the first place. Because there was irresponsible management of our soils. If we just bring it back because we built an economic opportunity for corporations to bring carbon back into the soil, we’ve lost again. Because the minute we stop paying those corporations to come up with solutions to problems they created in the first place, we are back to square one.

What our model  does is bring ownership and control of the 4p1000 initiative to communities. That is how we are going to win in the long term. That’s what is going to make it permanent and regenerative and sustainable and all of those things that we keep saying we want from this initiative.

Of the millions of farmers in Mexico who own less than 5 hectares [of land], if we took 5 for every 1000 for example, we could deploy enough production to supply 100 percent  of the eggs that Mexico consumes right now, totalling around 15,700 production units mimicking the one we have in San Miguel de Allende (Granjas Regenerativas). This allows us not only to restore soil and deliver on the 4p1000 initiative, but also allows us to do it on the basis of community engagement, rather than making it another business opportunity for the carbon traders. This is where we bring it to earth, so to speak, back to the soil.

RI: So you’re putting the power back in the hands of the small farmers.

Haslett-Marroquin: That would be the idea. If we don’t do that, we are really not going to change the way things are. What created the problem in the first place is greed, lack of interest and respect for nature. The folks who did that, the corporations who are responsible for that, it is not in their DNA to do otherwise. To think that somehow they are going to solve this problem is really naive. We have to do it on the basis of re-distribution of the ownership and control of the end result.

I believe in this case what we have done, is we’ve created a  very nice enterprise opportunity and design for small farmers, a way for them to get into this business in alignment with regenerative principles, and at the same time meet  all of the standards of the 4p1000 initiative.

I am happy that Mexico signed the 4p1000 agreement. This gives us a moral imperative. It gives an argument to be made for the fact that now Mexico has to deliver. It is not legally binding. Obviously these are voluntary commitments, but it does create the environment under which we can start this conversation about how do we change for real.

***

Alexandra Groome is Campaign & Events Coordinator for Regeneration International, a project of the Organic Consumers Association.

Griffin Klement is the Organic Consumers Association Latin American Project Director.

Organic Beats Conventional Agriculture in the Tropics

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[ English | Deutsch | French ]

A long-term study by the Swiss Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) in Kenya has shown clearly that organic agriculture not only generates comparable yields, but also produces more income and health benefits for farmers than conventional methods.

The 10-year study conducted in Thika and Chuka, sub-counties in Kenya, was conducted with local partners since 2007. It demystifies the myth that organic agriculture needs more space to achieve comparable yields to conventional agriculture. With input costs lower for organic agriculture and higher prices on the markets, incomes for organic farmers start to be higher after five years of cropping and reach a 53% higher benefit in the sixth year.

Another important factor revealed by the study is the significant improvement in soil fertility in organic farming. Additionally, the non-use of chemical inputs in organic farming systems generates beneficial effects on farms’ ecosystems as well as on the health of people since there are no harmful chemical residues. Parallel studies in India and Bolivia on the production of cotton and coffee respectively showed similar positive results for the organic methods.

The research of long-term Farming Systems Comparison in the Tropics (SysCom) is aimed at providing scientific evidence on the benefits and potential of organic versus conventional farming systems. The objective is to support the development of relevant policies and strategies to guide programmes that foster the adoption of sustainable land use practices at local, regional and international levels.

The study in Kenya has been designed very fairly; it does not compare industrial agriculture with highly specialist outputs of organic farming, but rather conventional agriculture involving staple cereal (maize) and includes crop rotation and other sustainable aspects. As a result, some of the findings are very close between the two systems, but as a whole the study shows clearly that the organic approach is a viable strategy in the tropics, with knowledge dissemination and training in organic farming being areas requiring greater attention.

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