Conservation Agriculture as Practiced in Tanzania

Pilot initiatives to introduce more sustainable farming practices are many in Africa; thorough documentation of results and lessons learned is scarce. Yet signs indicate that understanding is growing among practising farmers, stakeholders, researchers, and to a certain degree, policymakers, that sustainable agriculture bases itself on simple core principles. These principles, making use of natural processes, can respond to local climatic conditions and soil qualities as well as technological and socio-economic factors and conditions. Conservation agriculture is one of the most concrete and promising ways of implementing sustainable agriculture in practice. It relies on three basic principles: 1) minimum soil disturbance or if possible, notillage seeding; 2) soil cover: if possible, permanent; and 3) useful crop rotations and associations.