Conservation Farming in Zambia

Declining soil fertility and recurrent drought pose serious challenges to farmers in Africa’s semi-arid regions, where half of all farmland suffers from erosion and nutrient depletion (Cleaver and Schreiber, 1997). In response, farmers and researchers across the continent have experimented with a broad array of soil and water conserving technologies (Reij et al., 1996). This paper describes the development and dissemination of one such technology from Zambia.