Coupling crop diversification, soil and water conservation, soil fertility management, and pest and weed control in Lentil-Chickpea zones of Ethiopia

Abstract

The study aims at understanding factors determining concurrent farmers' strategies for sustainable intensification such as crop diversification, soil and water conservation, soil fertility management, and pest and weed control in the Lentil-Chickpea zone of Ethiopia, in coping with agricultural livelihood diversity. We applied a typology-based approach and sequential multi-variate statistic methods for sampled household and plot data in the Lentil-Chickpea zone in Moretna Jiru District, North-Shewa Amhara Region. We found high usage of a number of concurrent strategies by farmers for sustaining farm productivity through replenishing soil fertility, conserving soil and water, diversifying crops and controlling pests and weeds. The effects of farmer livelihood conditions on their strategies on sustainable intensification were non-directional and specific to agricultural livelihood system types. This implies that endowment of a resource enhances one or many farm strategies but at the same time acts as constraint to usage of others, whose effect also differ among the resource-poor, -moderate, and -rich agricultural livelihood types. Therefore, the typology-based approach would help improve the targeting of development projects, and make projects' impact assessment coping better with actual livelihood heterogeneity that is often ignored in the average/aggregated (business-as-usual) approach.