Overview
Smallholdings represent around 80% of the world’s farms and are concentrated in low- and middle-income countries, supplying around half of the world’s food. Smallholder farmers typically experience low and variable yields and profitability due to climate variability, low resource use and efficiencies, and declining soil health. These problems are particularly acute across sub-Saharan Africa, where farmers are contending with increasingly frequent episodes of extreme drought, flooding, pest and disease infestations, and poor soil fertility. Underutilized legume crops, as identified by the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (commonly known as VACS) initiative, could enable greater adaptation to the climate related-challenges smallholder farmers face.
Objectives and activities
The research teams will investigate the role of climate-smart agronomic practices and cropping systems within the scope of VACS, aligning with CGIAR’s new Sustainable Farming Science Program.
The research will prioritise studying crops identified by theVACS initiative, including Bambara groundnut and pigeon pea. The AgVACS team will be working in northern regions of Ghana and Nigeria, where cereal-legume cropping systems are dominant, to support national efforts to scale the adoption of more climate resilient cropping systems.
This project will be guided by
- co-design principles to embed a wide set of equity and system metrics
- statistical design principles to optimize experiments
- reuse of legacy soil and cropping system information
- modelling principles which include stakeholder preferences, to test and scale interventions across a range of conditions including under climate change.
The problem
Project partners
UK science
Rothamsted Research
University of Nottingham
University of Warwick
CGIAR
International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA)
Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (ABC)
Local partners
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research–Savanna Agricultural Research Institute (CSIR–SARI)
Bayero University Kano (BUK)
Where the project teams will be working
The AgVACS team will be working in northern regions of Ghana and Nigeria, where cereal-legume cropping systems are dominant, to support national efforts to scale the adoption of more climate resilient cropping systems.
